Short-bio: Prof. Alexandra Techet is currently an Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Ocean  Engineering at MIT.   She received her B.S.E. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 1995 from Princeton University and then graduated from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanographic Engineering with a M.S. in 1998 and a Ph.D. in 2001.   Prof. Techet specializes in experimental unsteady marine hydrodynamics  at high Reynolds numbers, and her research interests include fish swimming hydrodynamics, flow-structure  interactions in offshore systems, and complex free-surface hydrodynamics, including ship hydrodynamics and the impact of objects on a water surface.

Short-bio: LINDA GRIFFITH is a Professor of Mechanical and Biological Engineering at MIT and is Director of the NSF-funded Biotechnology Process Engineering Center, an engineering research center that focuses on gene therapy and stem cells. She received a Bachelor's Degree from Georgia Tech in 1982 and a PhD degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, both in chemical engineering. Following a postdoc with Robert Langer and Joseph Vacanti at MIT and Children's Hospital, she joined the faculty at MIT in Jan. 1991, teaching at MIT and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Griffith is a co-founder of Therics, Inc. and has served as consultant or scientific advisory board member for Advanced Tissue Sciences, AstraZeneca, Biohybrid Technologies, Corning, Cytotherapeuctics (Stem Cells, Inc.), DuPont, Schroeder Ventures, Therics, The Whitaker Foundation, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Illinois Institute of Technology Pritzker Institute of Medical Engineering. Her work has been featured on several television documentary shows including Scientific American Frontiers hosted by Alan Alda. Her awards include the Popular Science Brilliant 10 award, NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, MIT Class of ’60 Teaching Innovation Award, along with named lectures at academic institutions and societies. She is a Fellow in the Cambridge-MIT Institute. She has served as Co-Chair of the Materials Research Society Annual Spring Meeting, the Keystone Tissue Engineering Meeting, and the joint NSF-NIH Workshop on Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Training and Education, and is a member of the Advisory Council for the National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research at NIH. At MIT she chairs the Undergraduate Programs Committee for Biological Engineering, and led development of MIT’s new SB in Biological Engineering, which was approved in 2005 as MIT’s first new undergraduate “course of study” in 29 years.

Short-bio: Professor Nicolas Hadjiconstaninou is an Associate Professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.  He received his B.A. in Engineering from Cambridge University in 1993, and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 1998.  After spending a year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Lawrence Fellow, he joined the faculty at MIT.  His interests include molecular modeling and simulation of complex hydrodynamics, and characterization and extension of the limits of continuum theories.

Short-bio: Daniela Pucci de Farias received the B.S. in Computer Engineering and the M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1997 and 1998, both from the State University of Campinas, Brazil, and the Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering in 2002, from Stanford University. She joined the department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT in 2003, after spending a year as a postdoctoral associate at IBM Almaden. Her research interests lie in decision-making in large-scale systems, with current focus on approximate dynamic programming and games. Daniela is the recipient of an IBM Research Fellowship, the 2002 INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation Award and a 2004 IBM Faculty Award, and current holds an Edgerton Faculty Career Development chair.

Short-bio: Michael Thackeray is a group leader and senior scientist in the Battery Department of the Chemical Engineering Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town, South Africa and studied as a post-doctoral student at Oxford University, UK. He was manager of the Battery Unit at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa before taking up his current position at Argonne in 1994.

Short-bio: Dr. Alan H. Epstein is the R.C. Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics.  He received all of his degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT and has been on the faculty there since 1980. In addition to serving as Director of the MIT Gas Turbine Laboratory, Dr. Epstein leads the MIT MicroEngine Project, an interdisciplinary team developing shirt button sized gas turbine generators, rocket engines, and chemical lasers based on microsystem technology. He has over 100 technical publications in the fields of energy conversion, aero and rocket propulsion, instrumentation, and microsystems. Dr. Epstein is a member of the National Research Council Board on Army Science and Technology and a member of the DRAPA Defense Science Research Council.  He has received 4 ASME best paper awards, the ASME Gas Turbine Award, and the International Gas Turbine Institute Scholar Award.   Professor Epstein is a fellow of the AIAA and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Short-Bio: The Kamm Lab works on a variety of projects from the fundamental mechanisms by which cells sense and respond to mechanical stimulus, to the role of scaffold biophysical properties in initiating an aniogenic response, to the molecular mechanisms of Alzheimer's sidease. Kamm received his PhD from MIT in 1977, and is currently a member of the MIT Mechanical Engineering and Biological Engineering faculties. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers. He is recognized for his contributions to biomedical fluid mechanics, respiratory mechanics, and most recently, the mechanics of single cells.

This talk will begin by scaling the energy requirements and the solar resource.  The status of the PV industry will be presented with a summary of the development of technology as well as progress in cost/performance.  The author's own work on String Ribbon will be described.  String Ribbon is a manufacturing process for the direct production of tin crystalline silicon substrates in a continuous ribbon directly from a melt ( www.evergreensolar.com).   By eliminating the need to slice wafers
from an ingot, String Ribbon presents an opportunity to take a significant step toward photovoltaics that can compete with fossils fuels without subsidy.  Other areas of opportunities in PV will be described.

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Short-Bio: Professor Sang-Gook Kim is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He received a B.S. at Seoul National University in 1978, a M.S. at KAIST in 1980 and a Ph.D. at MIT in 1985, all in mechanical engineering. From 1985 to 1986, he was a manufacturing manager manager at Axiomatics Corp., Cambridge, MA. He then joined the Korea Institute of Science and Technology in 1986 as a senior research staff until 1991. He moved to Daewoo Corporation, Seoul, Korea in 1991, as a general manager at the Corporate Chairman's Office. He directed the Central Research Laboratory at Daewoo Electronics since 1994, and was promoted to a corporate director and corporate executive director in 1995 and 1998, respectively. Professor Kim returned to MIT in September 2000 as a faculty of Mechanical Engineering. His current research interests are: PZT MEMS for optical/RF products, energy harvesting for portable energy, carbon nanotubes assembly, and nano-manufacturing in multi-scale systems.

Short-bio: Professor Alleyne received his B.S. in Engineering Degree from Princeton University in 1989 in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering in 1992 and 1994, respectively, from The University of California at Berkeley. He joined the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1994 and is also appointed in the Coordinated Science Laboratory of UIUC. He currently holds the Ralph M. and Catherine V. Fisher Professorship in the College of Engineering, was awarded the ASME Dynamics Systems and Control Division’s Outstanding Young Investigator Award in 2003, and was a Fulbright Fellow to the Netherlands where he held a Visiting Professorship in Vehicle Mechatronics at TU Delft. His research interests are a mix of theory and implementation with a broad application focus. He has been active in the ASME, the IEEE, and several other societies where he has contributed extensively as an editor, associate editor, author, reviewer, and organizer. Further information about the toys he and his students play with can be found at the following website: http://mr-roboto.me.uiuc.edu.

Short-bio: Prof. Friedrich B. Prinz is Chair, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University. Since 1994, he has been the Rodney H. Adams Professor of Engineering, Stanford University, with dual appointments as Professor of the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. From 1994 to 2003, he was Co-Director of the Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing (AIM) at Stanford. Before joining Stanford University in 1994, he had been on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University for nearly 14 years and was Professor of Mechanical Engineering from 1987 to 1994, as well as Director of the Engineering Design Research Center (NSF-ERC) from 1989 to 1994. He has published over 100 papers, among which the recent ones focus on ionic conductivity at nanoscale, and on the performance of novel fuel cell structures.

Prof. Prinz was invited to deliver the Sir Christopher Hinton Lecture, Royal Academy of Engineering, UK, in 1991, and awarded Engineer-of-the-Year (1991-1992), American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Pittsburgh, PA Section. In 1996, he was elected Austrian Academy of Science (foreign member), Vienna, Austria. He holds a PhD degree (1975) in Physics from the University of Vienna, and has been active in synergistic activities with organizations like the National Research Council Committees, the Japanese Technology Evaluation Center and World Technology Evaluation Center, as well as Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation.

Short-bio: Thomas Peacock received B.Sc. from Manchester University (1994) and D. Phil. from Oxford University in 1998. In 2000 he joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently he is an Assistant Professor at Mechanical Engineering department (at MIT). His current research interests include Nonlinear Dynamics, Fluid Dynamics, Experimental Methods and Applied Mathematics.

Short-bio: Michael Goldfarb received the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Arizona in 1988, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 and 1994, respectively. In 1994 he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His current research interests include the design of high-energy-density robotic actuators, the control of fluid-powered actuators, and the design and control of haptic interfaces and telemanipulator systems.