RASEI Fellows

Kate Anderson is the Chief of Staff for Energy Systems Integration (ESI) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). In this role, Kate supports operations and strategic planning activities focused on power systems, energy security and resilience, systems analysis, and decision science. She coordinates energy justice activities across NREL, developing strategies to imbed equity in all phases of NREL’s work from research through deployment. Prior to this role, Kate was...

Assistant Professor Kyri Baker obtained her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in December 2014. She then worked for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory from 2015-2017 in both the Buildings and Thermal Sciences and the Power Systems centers. Dr. Baker is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering. Her research focuses on improving renewable...

Matthew C. Beard is a Senior Research Fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Director of the Center for Hybrid Organic Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE) an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the Office of Science within the US. Department of Energy CHOISE’s mission is to form a cohesive center-wide effort to accelerate discovery and elucidate design principles for unprecedented control over emergent properties involving spin, charge, and...

Joseph Berry (@joe_jberry) is a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory working on halide perovskite solar cells. His PhD for work was on spin transport and physics in semiconductor heterostructures from Penn State University. His efforts at NREL emphasize relating basic interfacial properties to technologically relevant device level behaviors in traditional and novel semiconductor heterostructures including oxides, organics and most recently hybrid semiconducting materials. He leads the US...

Jeffrey Cameron, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at CU Boulder. His research group focuses on the principles and mechanisms underlying the spatial and temporal organization of photosynthesis in cyanobacteria and eukaryotic organelles using synthetic biology and microscopy. Ancestors of modern day cyanobacteria were the first to perform oxygenic photosynthesis. These reactions have changed the atmospheric composition of this planet and have dramatically shifted...

Alberta Carpenter is a member of the Integrated Modeling & Economic Analysis Group in the Strategic Energy Analysis Center and leads NREL’s efforts for strategic analysis for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office. Dr. Carpenter is part of the leadership team for the Circular Economy for Energy Materials strategy and manages the team that developed and runs the Materials Flow through Industry tool . This tool provides supply...

Dr. Cuk obtained her Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Stanford University in 2007 and completed a Miller Postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. She is currently an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on the fundamental mechanisms involved in converting an electric current into a storable fuel at solid-liquid (electrode-electrolyte) interfaces. To do this, she utilizes multiple time-resolved spectroscopies...

Niels Damrauer, Ph.D., is associate professor of chemistry at CU-Boulder. He and his team are developing a research program that brings together strategies for actively controlling the photochemical and photophysical reactivity of electronically, structurally, and reactively complex systems. He is especially interested in discovering new types of photochemistry as well as the physical and synthetic strategies for achieving it. Areas being targeted are control of photochemistry using complex shaped laser...

Dan Dessau, Ph.D., is a professor of physics at CU-Boulder. His research interests center around using femtosecond optics and electron spectroscopic tools for the study of the electronic structure, magnetic structure, and phase transitions of novel materials systems such as high temperature superconductors (HTSCs or cuprates) and colossal magnetoresistive oxides (CMRs or manganites). Dessau is leading research into tungsten oxide (WO3) compounds which have the potential for dramatic decreases in...

Kevin L. Doran, J.D., is an Institute Fellow and Research Professor at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI), a joint institute of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he leads the Law & Policy Group. He is an expert in the policy dimensions of power systems and electric grids, fossil energy, energy security, and technology innovation. Professor Doran is Director of...

Caroline Draxl, Ph.D., is a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Flatirons Campus, where she advances the current state-of-the-art in mesoscale modeling as it specifically pertains to wind energy. Her research includes using numerical weather prediction models to study wind resources in various countries, conducting land-based and offshore boundary layer research, and coupling of the mesoscale flow features (kilometer scale) to the microscale (tens of meters) using mesoscale...

Gordana Dukovic, PhD, is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interests are in synthesis and ultrafast spectroscopy of nanoscale materials, with a focus on processes and materials relevant to solar photochemistry and solar energy harvesting. This includes development and study of new materials, as well as coupling of established nanoscale semiconductors with redox catalysts to drive multielectron reactions with light.

Paul Fleming, Ph.D., is the principal investigator for wind energy control systems at the National Wind Technology Center. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Vanderbilt University in 2009. His research focuses on wind farm control, including the modeling and design of wind farm control strategies. He has led some of the first public field demonstrations of wind farm controls and commercial facilities.

David Ginley, Ph.D., is a research fellow at NREL. He is currently involved in the study of the general class of defective transition metal oxides including high temperature superconductors, LiTMO2 rechargeable Li battery materials, ferroelectric materials, transparent conducting oxides and electrochromic materials. His group is also focused on the development of new nano-materials for organic electronics such as organic photovoltaics and as biofilters etc. In the area of organic electronics...

Don Grant is Chair of Sociology at CU Boulder. His past research on energy and environmental issues examined the effectiveness of U.S. states’ climate policies in reducing power plants’ carbon pollution and the uneven distribution of CO 2 emissions within countries’ electricity sectors. Currently, he is extending this research to investigate the effects of organizational characteristics, international trade, non-governmental organizations, inequality, entrepreneurial activity, and national energy regulations on individual power...

Michael Guarnieri, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist and Principal Investigator at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. His research employs molecular systems biology approaches—integrating synthetic biology and functional genomics with molecular microbiology and biochemical techniques—to elucidate microbial metabolic regulatory mechanisms and engineer microbial biocatalysts for novel biofuel and intermediate biosynthetic capacity. Dr. Guarnieri earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where his...

Gregor P. Henze, Ph.D., P.E. is professor and holds the C.V. Schelke Chair in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado. His teaching focuses on the building energy systems side of architectural engineering, i.e., thermal environmental engineering, HVAC and refrigeration systems, design of energy efficient buildings, building control and automation systems, data science for building engineering applications, and sustainable building design. His research emphasizes...

Dr. Bri-Mathias Hodge is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering and a Fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a Chief Scientist in the Power Systems Engineering Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). His research focuses on the modeling and simulation of power and energy systems, with an emphasis on the...

Adam Holewinski, Ph.D., is an Asst. Prof. in Chemical and Biological Engineering at CU Boulder. His research interests include efficient processes for the production of energy, as well as commodity and fine chemicals, with emphasis placed on electrochemical routes—i.e. the direct interconversion between electrical energy and the energy of chemical bonds. These processes are particularly suited to utilize power from renewables like wind and solar and can generally operate at...

Jonathan Hughes is an Assistant Professor of Economics and non-rostered core faculty member in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He received his Ph.D. in Transportation Technology and Policy from the University of California at Davis in 2009. Jonathan has a background in mechanical engineering (BSE, Duke University) and materials science (MSE, Cornell University). His research interests include climate change policy, gasoline, electricity and renewable energy markets.

Justin Johnson is a Senior Scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). His research interests include investigating the dynamics of photophysical phenomena associated with solar light harvesting, energy storage, and quantum information in both molecular and nanoscale semiconductor systems. These include processes in which understanding, and engineering of intermolecular and interfacial interactions are crucial. Advanced time-resolved spectroscopy techniques, including ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy and pulse electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy,...

David Jonas, Ph.D., is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at CU-Boulder. Jonas and his group used femtosecond lasers to demonstrate the first optical analogs of early two-dimensional NMR experiments. The approach is now widely used to measure fast electronic and vibrational motions in disordered environments such as liquids, proteins, and semiconductors, but more work is needed to develop 2D spectroscopy as an analytical technique. Jonas' group has used 2D...

Daniel Kaffine, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at CU Boulder. His research interests are in resource, energy and environmental economics. Recent and ongoing projects examine the impact of allowing hybrid vehicles to use HOV lanes, the general equilibrium effects of Renewable Portfolio Standards, the impact of wind power on emissions across the US, and the role of property rights and institutions in wind power development...

Lawrence L. Kazmerski, Ph.D., is a member of the Materials Design Group in RASEI and Emeritus Member of Research Staff of NREL. His career spans 50 years of R&D and technical leadership in solar and photovoltaic technology. His current research focuses on PV reliability issues. This includes research on soiling problems for PV systems, with programs supported in Brazil and India. He works to support research on inverse design projects...

Paul King, PhD, is the Acting Center Director for Biosciences, and Manager of the Physical Biochemistry and Photosynthesis Group at NREL. His research interests are on reduction-oxidation (redox) enzymes that catalyze biological transformation reactions that are fundamental to solar energy conversion. A focus of the work is to apply biophysical and spectroscopic approaches to understand electron transfer and small molecule activation mechanisms, where light-capture by nanoscale materials is utilized to...

Dr. Benjamin Kroposki is the Director of the Power Systems Engineering Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) where he leads NREL’s strategic research in the design, planning and operations of electrical power systems. He received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech and PhD from the Colorado School of Mines. His expertise is in the design, testing, and integration of renewable and distributed power systems...

Dr. Charles (Chuck) Kutscher is a Fellow and Senior Research Associate of the University of Colorado Boulder Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI). Dr. Kutscher spent 4 decades as a renewable energy researcher and manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and was the Director of the Buildings and Thermal Sciences Center when he retired from NREL in July 2018. He is a Past Chair and Fellow of the...

Ross Larsen received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1998 from Brown University. He worked on developing theoretical and simulation methods to understand at an atomistic level how atoms and molecules move and exchange energy in solution. From 1998 to 2001 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Santa Barbara studying near-field optics of nanostructures. From 2001 to 2009 he was, variously, a postdoctoral researcher, staff scientist and...

Jeffrey Logan has nearly 30 years of experience in energy policy analysis, low-carbon market development, energy security, and strategic planning. Over the past 11 years at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), he has led innovative work on international power sector transformation, beneficial electrification, natural gas and renewable energy synergies, renewable energy policy design, and collaboration with key developing countries. He currently manages the 21 st Century Power Partnership ,...

Oana Luca is a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (BS ’08) and Yale University (MS ’10, PhD ’13) where she worked with Professor Robert H. Crabtree. At Yale she worked with a team from General Electron to develop hybrid fuel cell flow batteries for virtual storage of hydrogen within organic molecules. Her postgraduate work in inorganic and physical organic chemistry at Caltech in the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis and...

Julie Lundquist, Ph.D., is an associate professor at CU-Boulder. She and her group investigate the dynamics of the atmospheric boundary layer, with applications to wind energy, urban meteorology, and surface-atmosphere interaction. They employ numerical weather prediction models such as the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and other large-eddy simulation capabilities, and they participate in field experiments to expand our understanding of the atmospheric boundary layer. To support broad integration...

Joseph M. Luther is currently the acting leader of the Hybrid and Nanoscale Materials Chemistry group within the Chemical Materials and Nanoscience Center at NREL. He is a PI in the Center for Hybrid Organic Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE, an EFRC funded by DOE-BES), leads a DOD-funded perovskite effort at NREL and serves as a contributing team member in the SETO funded efforts. His research is on developing low...

Seth Marder, PhD joined RASEI as the Director in July 2021. He received his BA in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After completing his postdoctoral work at the University of Oxford, he moved to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology. Dr. Marder has served on numerous advisory boards for journals and is the founding chair of the...

Michael Marshak, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of chemistry at CU-Boulder. His research program spans the fields of organic and inorganic chemistry to make new chemicals and materials. Specifically, he plans to investigate organic reactions featuring new transition metal catalysts, nanoparticle and thin-film materials, and chemical transformations related to biomass and carbon dioxide. Michael has helped to pioneer the use of organic materials called quinones for flow batteries, a promising...

Barry Mather Ph.D. is the Manager of the Integrated Devices and Systems Group and Principal Engineer in the Power Systems Engineering Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). He received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, working within the Colorado Power Electronics Center (CoPEC). His research interests include the development of...

Maureen McCann joined NREL from Purdue University, where she was a Professor of Biological Sciences and Director of Purdue’s NEPTUNE Center for Power and Energy, funded by the Office of Naval Research. Maureen has also served as the Director of the Center for Direct Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Biofuels (C3Bio), an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science. Within C3Bio,...

Mike McGehee is a Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a Fellow of the Materials Science and Engineering Program and the Renewable Energy and Sustainability Institute. He was a professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Stanford University for 18 years and a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. His current research interests are developing...

Dr. Elisa Miller-Link is a Staff Scientist at NREL. She studies the surface of semiconductors that are applicable for solar fuel generation, such as NH 3 and H 2 generation, and photovoltaics. She is interested in manipulating and controlling surface energetics, charge transfer, and surface reactions by doping, surface passivation, straining, and quantum confinement. Her research focuses on quantum confined nanomaterials, such as 2D transition-metal dichalcogenides, that can be tuned...

Nate Neale is a Senior Scientist and the Interfacial Materials Chemistry Group Manager at NREL. His research focuses on developing novel wet chemical and gas-phase approaches to tailor the compositional structure and surface chemistry of nanostructured inorganic semiconductors and related materials for photocatalysis, solar fuels, and electrochemical energy storage. The majority of his work seeks to develop a fundamental mechanistic understanding of how interfacial chemistry impacts charge transfer and energetics...

Arthur J. Nozik, FRSC, is a Senior Research Fellow, Emeritus at NREL and Research Professor in the Department of Chemistry at CU-Boulder. In 2009 Nozik, was selected as associate director of a joint Los Alamos National Lab/NREL Energy Frontier Research Center for DOE. In 2007, he was appointed the scientific director of the new Center for Revolutionary Solar Photoconversion under the Colorado Renewable Energy Collaboratory. Nozik's research interests include size...

Lucy Y. Pao, Ph.D., is the Palmer Endowed Chair Professor in the Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering Department at CU Boulder. She earned B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Her research primarily focuses on engineering control systems, with applications ranging from rapid and precise control of atomic force microscopes to multi-megawatt wind energy systems. She is a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control...

Scott Parker is a theoretical physicist with expertise in fusion energy science. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has recently served on the DOE Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee and the DIII-D National Fusion Facility Program Advisory Committee. Professor Parker’s research focuses on multiscale kinetic simulation methods and extreme scale computing applied tokamak edge turbulence and energy transport. Additionally, he is working on problems in quantum...

Charles Rogers, Ph.D., is a physics professor at CU-Boulder. His laboratory has a long history of work on thin-film materials including energy-oriented materials such as high temperature superconductors and transparent conductors, with the best collection of novel thin-film growth systems available on the CU-Boulder campus (four laser ablation systems, six-target sputtering system, 9kV e-gun deposition system, two thermal evaporators). The lab also has a long history of working with nanofabricated...

Dr. “Paty” Romero-Lankao joined NREL’s Center for Integrated Mobility Sciences in 2018 as a senior research scientist in joint appointment with the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, where she is a research fellow. Previously, she has senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Paty examines the interactions among people and cities, with a particular emphasis on the sustainability of energy systems, mobility, and the built...

Garry Rumbles, Ph.D., is a research fellow at NREL and an adjoint professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at CU-Boulder. Rumbles joined NREL in 2000 and is widely recognized for his research in photochemistry and photophysics of conjugated molecular systems, energy conversion in organic light emitting diodes and organic photovoltaic devices, and nanoscale morphology. In 2004, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Rumbles...

Sean Shaheen, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at CU-Boulder. His research interests focus on organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices for low-cost, renewable energy harvesting. His group and collaborators engage in a wide range of activities in OPV research, including studying fundamental aspects of energy transfer and exciton dynamics, measurements of charge transport and recombination behavior, and modeling of device physics using various numerical techniques. More...

Ivan Smalyukh, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and the NSF-sponsored Soft Matter Materials Research Center at CU-Boulder. Smalyukh's research centers on organizing principles of nanoscale material self-assembly and light-matter interactions. Smalyukh and his research group are studying the long-range ordered molecular and nanoparticle organization with the focus on applications in organic photovoltaic solar cells. Smalyukh is organizing annual inter-continental advanced materials for photonics (I-CAMP) summer...

Wilson A. Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Delft University of Technology. He earned his BS in Physics from American University in 2005, and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Georgia in 2010, where he studied the synthesis and applications of nanostructured photocatalysts. From there he moved to Paris, France as a postdoctoral research associate at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie/Sorbonne...

Dr. Tenent is a senior scientist in the Materials Science Center at NREL. Prior to joining NREL, he brought an early stage company out of a collaboration between North Carolina State University and the University of California-Riverside. This company (ZettaCore, Inc.) was founded to commercialize one of Science Magazine's Break Through Technologies of the year in 2001 in the field of molecular electronics. Dr. Tenent still maintains substantial partnerships within...

Mike Toney is a Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering and a Fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) at CU Boulder. He received his B.S. from Caltech and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Washington. After a NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship, he joined the IBM Research Division to focus on the use of X-ray scattering methods for structure determination for polymer...

Jao van de Lagemaat, received his PhD in 1998 from the University of Utrecht. He worked on the exciton dynamics, charge transport properties, and the physical and chemical properties of interfaces of large band gap semiconductors like SiC, GaP, GaN and diamond. From 1998 to 2001 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. His studies focused on charge transport and recombination in dye-sensitized solar cells...

Kathryn has over two decades of experience leading global social impact and sustainability programs within the public, private, and higher education sectors. As the Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility (CESR) at CU Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, Kathryn helps to empower business leaders to drive solutions to environmental, social, and ethical challenges. Previously, Kathryn was the Director of Program Delivery at Stanford University's Institute for...

Sadegh Yazdi, Ph.D., is a Research Associate Professor at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI), and the Director of the Facility for Electron Microscopy of Materials (CU FEMM) at the University of Colorado. His research interests include developing novel electron microscopy techniques for exploring the links between the underlying atomic arrangements of energy-related materials and their performance, properties, and synthesis. To characterize nanostructures at atomic levels, Sadegh uses advanced...

Jeffrey G. York received his PhD from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. He is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Research Director of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business at CU-Boulder. His research examines how, why, and when entrepreneurship can reduce environmental degradation through green building and renewable energy.

Prof. Alex Zunger of the University of Colorado, Boulder research field is Condensed Matter Theory of Real Materials, involving foundational work on Density Functional Theory, Pseudopotential theory, Quantum Nanostructures, Photovoltaic materials and Materials by Design. He is the recipient of the year 2018 Boer Medal for photovoltaic research, the 2013 Hume- Rothery Award on Theory of alloys, the 2011 (inaugural) “Materials Theory Award” of the Materials Research Society on Inverse...