Former RASEI Contributors

Gregg T. Beckham, PhD, is a Group Leader at NREL. His research focuses on conversion of biomass to fuels, chemicals, and materials including in the areas of metabolic engineering, fermentation, separations, chemical catalysis, biopolymer production, cellulase enzyme improvements, renewable carbon fiber production, theory and simulation to design biological and chemical catalysts, and lignin valorization.

William Boyd is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Boyd was previously Professor of Law and John H. Schultz Energy Law Fellow at University of Colorado Boulder School of Law. His primary research and teaching interests are in energy law and regulation, climate change law and policy, and environmental law. Much of his recent scholarship has been motivated...

Howard Branz, Ph.D., a nationally and internationally renowned scientist with achievements in physics, materials science, and device engineering related to renewable energy. Branz has led NREL's amorphous silicon photovoltaic development for more than 5 years and all of NREL's silicon research. Primary research interests include film crystal silicon photovoltaics; defects, metastability, and diffusion in semiconductors; amorphous semiconductors; mechanisms of film and epitaxial silicon growth; and nanostructured black silicon.

Robert W. Erickson, Ph.D., is a member of the faculty of electrical and computer engineering at CU-Boulder. Dr. Erickson's research focuses on new approaches to control and convert electrical power with ultra-high efficiency, with application to renewable energy systems and other applications of electrical power. This research incorporates advances in magnetics technology and modeling with advances in power conversion circuitry to push the limits of achievable system efficiency. He has...

Professor Gill's research falls within the general fields of metabolic engineering and directed evolution. The overarching objective of his group's work is to develop new genetic and genomic tools and applications to improve fundamental understanding of the evolution and engineering of relevant traits in bacteria of industrial and clinical relevance.

Rebecca has extensive project experience in large capital projects related to building and optimizing supply chains, operations, and infrastructure. The majority of her work has been in the manufacturing and service industries. She has an BS in biology from the University of Oregon and MS in environmental engineering from Stanford University.

Michael brought more than forty years of energy science and technology expertise to the University of Colorado Boulder. He served as a consultant specializing in transitions and creating new research directions in agency and institutional programs, projects, and major research facilities, and has led several teams developing multi-billion dollar proposals and contracts for the Department of Energy (DOE). He has been involved in strategic planning and project management for multidisciplinary...

SeHee Lee, Ph.D. is professor of Mechanical Engineering, CU-Boulder. His primary research interests have concentrated on nanostructured materials for energy applications, and his laboratory expertise includes thin-film deposition (evaporation, sputtering, PE-CVD, sol-gel synthesis, etc.), electro-optic characterization, AC impedance spectroscopy and electrochemical deposition and analyses techniques. During his ten-year tenure at NREL, he was engaged in the research and development of a variety of technical subjects: solid-state thin-film lithium batteries, nano-composite...

Lewis and students have studied lakes, streams, and wetlands in Colorado and in the American and Southeast Asian tropics. His interests include biogeochemistry of inland waters, food web dynamics, biotic productivity, and environmental factors controlling structure and function of aquatic ecosystems. Examples of recent work include construction and validation of a model that estimates global primary production of lakes under preindustrial conditions and under current conditions, quantification of denitrification rates...

Pin-Ching Maness is a Emeritus Researcher, Principal Scientist and Photobiology Group Manager of NREL’s Biosciences Center. She is currently involved in several DOE funded projects including gaining insight into mechanistic details of redox enzymes, probing design principles for biosystems redesign, and developing microbial platforms to enable solar- or biomass-conversion technologies for the production of biofuels and biochemicals. Her effort in developing the biomass-to-hydrogen technology has been recognized by DOE as...

Angelo Mascarenhas, Ph.D., is a principal scientist and team leader for Solid State Spectroscopy in the Center for Basic Sciences at NREL. He works in the area of spectroscopic research on photovoltaic materials for improved and advanced solar cells. He has done extensive research on harnessing the material consequences of semiconductor alloy instabilities such as spontaneous ordering and spontaneous composition modulation for optoelectronic applications. His current research focuses on the...

Dr. Robert McGrath was RASEI Director 2015-2020. In this role, he served under a joint appointment between the University of Colorado and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Prior to joining the University of Colorado as Research Professor and Director of RASEI, Bob served as senior vice president at the Georgia Institute of Technology and director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). GTRI is an applied research powerhouse providing...

Will Medlin, Ph.D., is professor and chair in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, as well as the Managing Director of the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels. Medlin and his group investigate reactions at solid surfaces for renewable and sustainable energy applications. The group is particularly focused on interfacial chemistry important in the conversion of biomass to fuels and chemicals. Biomass-derived carbohydrates and lipids contain a high degree...

Pat Moriarty, Ph.D., a senior engineer at NREL's National Wind Technology Center, where he spends most of his time researching statistical loads extrapolation techniques for wind turbine design. He has developed new design techniques that enable industry to more reliably predict loads and produce cheaper designs. This work is included in the IEC International design standard 61400-1, edition 3, published in 2004. Moriarty continues to research wind turbine design and...

Charles Musgrave, Ph.D., is a professor of chemical and biological engineering and professor by courtesy of chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. His program involves the application of a wide variety of quantum mechanical modeling methods to problems in the energy sciences. His program includes research on photovoltaics, including singlet fission and exciton transport and splitting for more efficient organic solar cells; catalysis, including the chemical reduction of CO2...

Prashant Nagpal is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and the co-Founder, co-CSO and member of the Board of PRAAN Biosciences Inc. Prashant earned his Ph.D. from University of Minnesota and completed his post-doctoral research at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He leads an interdisciplinary research group with emphasis on design of nanomaterials and processes for applications in energy and biology. He has published over 30 manuscripts in...

Richard Noble, Ph.,D., is the Alfred T. & Betty E. Look Professor of chemical engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Science and co-director of the Membrane and Applied Science Center (MAST) at CU-Boulder. Noble and his group are studying the use of ionic liquids for gas separations with plans to evaluate various ionic liquids and complexation chemistry to tailor the material properties to the feed mixture being separated...

Bryan Pivovar, Ph.D., is senior scientist, leading fuel cell R&D activities at NREL. Pivovar has been involved in fuel cell research for more than 15 years, He joined NREL in May of 2008, and since has grown a fuel cell R&D program that had ~$100k/yr funding, into a program that has a projected annual budget of ~$5M/yr for 2010. Prior to joining NREL, Pivovar was at Los Alamos National Lab...

Bill Tumas is the director for the Chemical and Materials Science Center in Energy Sciences at NREL. He came to NREL from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he held positions of increasing responsibility since 1994. Most recently, as program director of Applied Energy Programs, he was responsible for management, sponsor interface, and development of Los Alamos R&D programs in renewable energy, energy efficiency, infrastructure, and fossil energy. Tumas has extensive...

John Turner, Ph.D., is a research fellow at NREL. Turner is recognized as a world–class scientist and international spokesperson for hydrogen energy and for his contribution in hydrogen production via photoelectrochemical splitting of water and in the development of fuel cells. He received the DOE Office of Science Outstanding Mentor Award and has co–authored more than 100 technical publications.