Energy Solutions (Audio)

Architect Drew Hubbell explores the intersection of sustainable design and architectural artistry, highlighting how thoughtful, aesthetically rich structures can also embody strong environmental principles. He presents several recent projects, with particular attention to their fire-resistant strategies and materials. Against the backdrop of increasingly destructive wildfires across California, Hu...

The extractive linear economy and policies focused on endless growth have produced unparalleled socioeconomic inequality and the climate crisis. Communities around the world are calling for new economic models that are regenerative towards people, place, and ecosystems. Ancestral ʻŌiwi (indigenous Hawaiian) economic systems were built around people's relationships and understandings of wai (water)...

Climate investor and philanthropist Tom Steyer, recipient of the 2025 Charles David Keeling Memorial Lecture, talks about the current and future state of energy. In a conversation with Scott Lewis of Voice of San Diego, Steyer argues that capitalism and policy must work together at scale, and highlights the marketplace rise of renewables like solar and EVs alongside challenges like slow fossil-pla...

Batteries have become an essential component of our daily life. They power our smartphones, laptops, tablets, and many of the cars around us. They are also key to the renewable energy transition. Building better batteries requires the design of materials whose chemical composition and structure evolve drastically on charge and discharge, yet those changes must be perfectly reversible for the devic...

The "energy transition" is actually a shift from relying on fossil fuels (like coal, oil, and gas) to using metals to generate energy. However, extracting metals has always been a significant environmental and political issue, especially for cities. This problem has been around for centuries, even ancient Roman writers wrote about it. In this program, Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy...

Oil and gas are the most traded commodities on the planet; they are also the chief causes of the most grievous harm our species has yet faced, the burgeoning climate crisis. Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and a founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate and racial justice. He examines how the export of hydrocarbons,...

What role do oil companies have in tackling climate change? In this program, Paasha Mahdavi, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara, talks about the challenge of getting big oil to take climate change seriously. Mahdavi's research broadly explores comparative environmental politics and the political consequences of natural resource wealth. He is the author of Power Grab: Poli...

How can we use raw materials to improve the environment? In this program, Susannah L. Scott, professor of chemistry at UC Santa Barbara, discusses how to efficiently use catalytic conversion of unconventional materials, such as biomass and synthetic polymers to create sustainable routes to renewable energy, fuels and chemicals. Series: "GRIT Talks" [Science] [Show ID: 39440]

Effective management of thermal-fluids transport has become a critical challenge in many energy, water, and electronic applications due to the increasing power density and shrinking length scales. In this talk, I will first describe our effort to manipulate multi-phase fluid motion using light-responsive surfactants. Upon illuminating droplets and bubbles with light, the surfactants at the fluid-f...

Modern slavery, which encompasses 45 million people around the world, is intricately linked to the economy, politics, violence and war, gender and the environment. In this panel discussion, Kevin Bales, professor of contemporary slavery and research director of the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham, talks about the impact of contemporary slavery with three UC Berkeley professors, Arlie Ho...

There are 45 million enslaved people in the world today. The links between slavery, conflict, environmental destruction, economics and consumption began to strengthen and evolve in the 20th century. The availability of people who might be enslaved dramatically increased in line with population growth. According to Kevin Bales, professor of contemporary slavery and research director of the Rights L...

Lei Li is an assistant professor in Computer Science Department at University of California Santa Barbara. His research interest lies in natural language processing, machine translation, and AI-powered drug discovery. He received his B.S. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Ph. D. from Carnegie Mellon University. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 38476]

Rob Ober is Chief Platform Architect of NVIDIA’s data center products, and works with global Hyperscales to architect AI and Deep Learning clusters, develop systems and platform architecture, and influence NVIDIA hardware and software platform roadmaps. His background is in processor and system architecture, with experience in networking, storage, memories, and wireless. Rob has over 40 internatio...

Katharine E. Schmidtke received a B.Sc. Degree in physics and mathematics from Keele University, UK, in 1989 and Ph. D in laser physics and non-linear optics from the University of Southampton in 1993. She went on to do post-doctoral research in epitaxial growth of non-linear optical materials at Stanford University, CA, USA. She has a 25-year career in the optical communications industry includin...

Yufei Ding joined the Department of Computer Science (with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering), University of California at Santa Barbara as an Assistant Professor in Nov 2017. Her research interests lie in the broad fields of domain-specific language design, architecture and compiler optimization, and hardware acceleration. Her current research focuses on b...

Martin Fischer is the Kumagai Professor of Engineering at Stanford University and directs the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering. He is known globally for his work and leadership in developing and applying digital methods to increase the productivity of construction project teams, enhance building performance, and create new strategic opportunities for firms in the construction industry. H...

Dan Nall is a professional engineer, a registered architect, an ASHRAE and an AIA Fellow, a LEED Fellow, an ASHRAE Certified Building Energy Modeling Professional, a certified High Performance Building Design Professional and a Certified Passive House Consultant. He is currently a member of the ASHRAE Task Force for Building Decarbonization, is Chair of ASHRAE Standards Project Committee 227P, the...

Cliff Young is a software engineer in Google Research, where he works on codesign for deep learning accelerators. He is one of the designers of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and one of the founders of the MLPerf benchmark. Previously, Cliff built special- purpose supercomputers for molecular dynamics at D. E. Shaw Research and was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs. Cliff holds AB, M...

Mead Rusert is President of Automated Logic, a leading provider of innovative building automation and energy management solutions that maximize energy efficiency and ensure occupant comfort and engagement. With over 30 years of industry experience, he brings a broad background to the position including executive roles in engineering, product management, and marketing for commercial HVAC products a...

Surendra Anubolu is a Distinguished Engineer at Broadcom in the Switch Group. He is currently working on benchmarking and enhancing performance of distributed AI work loads and telemetry for network applications. Since joining Broadcom in 2015, Surendra worked on the Tomahawk and Trident line of products. Prior to Broadcom, Surendra worked at Cisco as Director of Engineering responsible for delive...

Bharath Muthiah is a Technical Lead in Meta’s Infrastructure team and leads technical sourcing for large scale AI HW cluster technologies and solutions. In this capacity, Bharath engages extensively with Meta’s strategic technology partners, industry consortiums, hyperscale peers, and academic partners in influencing customization and optimizations for Meta’s key AI use cases. Prior to this, Bhara...

Ravi Agarwal is a technical sourcing manager at the Facebook Infrastructure group. In this role, he is responsible for driving advanced packaging architectures and foundry for both networking and AI/ML compute applications to meet Facebook future workloads. He is driving Chiplet Business Workstream in Open Domain-Specific Architecture (ODSA) Sub-Project within the Open Compute Project (OCP) workin...

UC Santa Barbara's Clint Schow discusses how to bring low-power O-band coherent optics to data centers. Schow received B.S., M.S. and Ph. D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. After positions at IBM and Agility Communications, Dr. Schow spent more than a decade at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, as a Research Staff Member and Manager of the Optical Link an...

High Volume Silicon Photonics for Co-Packaged Optics and Optical I/O with Thomas Liljeberg of Intel. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 38466]

Manish Mehta is the VP of Marketing and Operations for the Optical Systems Division at Broadcom. Manish leads go-to- market and operational activity for the division responsible for developing and manufacturing devices and systems used in optical communications. Prior to joining Broadcom, Manish was EVP and Product Line Management of Source Photonics where he led the company's entry into the datac...