MIT J-WAFS Food and Water Conference: Addressing the Global Food & Water Challenge through Innovation and Collaboration

Dr. Karen K. Gleason is Associate Provost and the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1987 and has served as Executive Officer of the Chemical Engineering Department, Associate Director for the Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies; and as Associate Dean of Engineering for Research.

Professor Gleason’s research focuses on the near room-temperature synthesis of ultrathin, conformal organic films by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Gleason has authored more than 250 publications and holds 18 issued US patents for CVD polymers and their applications in optoelectronic, sensing, microfluidic, energy storage, and biomedical devices, and for the surface modification of membranes.

Gleason is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChE) and held the Donders Visiting Professorship Chair at Utrecht University, Netherlands. Her awards include the ID TechEx Printed Electronics Europe Best Technical Development Materials Award, the AIChE Process Development Research Award, and Young Investigator Awards from both the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. She has delivered the Van Ness Award Lecture at the Rensselaer Polytechnic University and the Tis Lahiri Lecture at Vanderbuilt University.

In 2001, Prof Gleason co-founded GVD Corporation, which has successfully scaled-up and commercialized technology invented in her MIT lab. GVD is headquartered in Cambridge, MA and has manufacturing facilities in Greenville, SC. In 2014, she co-founded Drop-Wise for improving the efficiency of steam power cycles.

Gleason received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Her BS and MS degrees are from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also won All-American honors in swimming.

John H. Lienhard V is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Food and the Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab at MIT. During more than 26 years on the MIT faculty, Lienhard’s research and educational efforts have focused on water purification and desalination, heat and fluid flow, and experimentation. He has also filled a number of administrative roles at MIT. Lienhard received his bachelors and masters degrees in thermal engineering at UCLA from the Chemical, Nuclear, and Thermal Engineering Department. He joined MIT immediately after completing his PhD in the Applied Mechanics and Engineering Science Department at UC San Diego. Lienhard’s research on water purification includes humidification-dehumidification desalination, membrane distillation desalination, osmotic processes, solar-driven desalination, scale formation, electrodialysis, management of high salinity brines, thermodynamic and energy efficiency analysis of desalination cycles, and energy-water nexus issues. Lienhard has directly supervised more than 70 graduate theses and postdoctoral associates.

Lienhard is a recipient of the 1988 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the 1992 SAE Teetor Award, a 1997 R&D 100 Award, the 2012 ASME Technical Communities Globalization Medal, and is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Lienhard and his students have received three best paper awards at water and desalination conferences during the past 3 years. He holds more than a dozen US Patents, many of which have been commercialized in the water industry. Lienhard is the co-author of textbooks on heat transfer and on measurement and instrumentation. His heat transfer book has been available online at no charge since 2002, and more than 300,000 copies have been downloaded (ahtt.mit.edu). His measurements book has sold more than 100,000 copies. He has created new courses on desalination, on thermal modeling, and on compressible fluid mechanics. He has also received several awards at MIT for his teaching. In addition, Lienhard has directed the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy at MIT and KFUPM since it was founded in 2008.

Ralph Jerome has worked in an executive function for Mars, Incorporated for over a decade. A specialist in driving corporate innovation, Mr. Jerome has consistently advocated the need for agility in process and product innovation in order to respond to the increasing demands of our changing climate. Mars is committed to driving transformational innovation that helps solve long-term challenges-from securing a safe and sustainable supply of raw materials to boosting agricultural productivity.

Dr. Karen K. Gleason is Associate Provost and the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1987 and has served as Executive Officer of the Chemical Engineering Department, Associate Director for the Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies; and as Associate Dean of Engineering for Research.

Professor Gleason’s research focuses on the near room-temperature synthesis of ultrathin, conformal organic films by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Gleason has authored more than 250 publications and holds 18 issued US patents for CVD polymers and their applications in optoelectronic, sensing, microfluidic, energy storage, and biomedical devices, and for the surface modification of membranes.

Gleason is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChE) and held the Donders Visiting Professorship Chair at Utrecht University, Netherlands. Her awards include the ID TechEx Printed Electronics Europe Best Technical Development Materials Award, the AIChE Process Development Research Award, and Young Investigator Awards from both the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. She has delivered the Van Ness Award Lecture at the Rensselaer Polytechnic University and the Tis Lahiri Lecture at Vanderbuilt University.

In 2001, Prof Gleason co-founded GVD Corporation, which has successfully scaled-up and commercialized technology invented in her MIT lab. GVD is headquartered in Cambridge, MA and has manufacturing facilities in Greenville, SC. In 2014, she co-founded Drop-Wise for improving the efficiency of steam power cycles.

Gleason received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Her BS and MS degrees are from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also won All-American honors in swimming.

Jan Schnorr is Chief Executive Officer of C2Sense. Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Swager laboratory (Department of Chemistry at MIT), and also completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at MIT. During this time, he has worked on functionalized carbon nanotubes and carbon nanotube based chemical sensors. He has published 13 peer-reviewed papers with a total of over 300 citations. He is co-inventor on six patents/patent applications, including C2Sense’s ethylene sensing and rapid prototyping technology.

Rajeev J. Ram has worked in the areas of physical optics and electronics for much of his career. In the early 1990’s, he developed the III‑V wafer bonding technology that led to record brightness light emitting devices at Hewlett-Packard Laboratory in Palo Alto.  While at HP Labs, he worked on the first commercial deployment of surface emitting lasers.  In the early 1990’s, he developed the first semiconductor laser without population inversion, semiconductor lasers that employ condensation of massive particles, and threshold-less lasers.

Since 1997, Ram has been on the Electrical Engineering faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He has served on the Defense Sciences Research Council advising DARPA on new areas for investment and served as a Program Director at the newly founded  Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy.   At ARPA‑e, he managed a research portfolio exceeding $100M and consulted with the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the White House.

His group at MIT has developed record energy-efficient photonics for microprocessor systems,  microfluidic systems for the control of cellular metabolism, and the first light-source with greater than 100% electrical-to-optical conversion efficiency.  His group’s work on small-scale solar thermoelectric generation is being deployed for rural electrification in the developing world as SolSource and was recognized with the St. Andrews Prize for Energy and the Environment.

Ram holds degrees in Applied Physics from California Institute of Technology and Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Steve created and launched the Responsible Supply Chains (RSC) advisory business for Cargill, Inc. Steve created a joint business relationship between Cargill and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that brings leading solutions to clients in the area of responsible supply chains and sustainability. The Cargill RSC advisory business provides strategic consulting to organizations, helping them quickly identify, prioritize and quantify environmental and social performance improvement projects in their supply chain, resulting in cost reduction, risk mitigation and brand elevation. Prior his current role, Steve led supply chain functions for a Cargill ingredient business and worked for Andersen Corporation overseeing their transportation and fleet functions. Steve has extensive experience in supply chain management, transportation and third-party logistics. He currently sits on the boards of World CNG, Living Well Disability Services and Revolution Fuels, where Steve is also a founder.

Colette Heald is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Professor Heald was a recipient of both the Canadian NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship and the NASA Earth System Science Graduate Fellowship. Her thesis focused on transpacific transport of pollution and the use of inverse modeling to estimate emissions from aircraft and satellite observations. She was a recipient of the NOAA Global and Climate Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, which supported her research at the University of California Berkeley from 2006 through 2007, with Professor Allen Goldstein and Prof. Inez Fung. She became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University in 2008 and moved to MIT in January of 2012.

Heald, an atmospheric chemist, is widely recognized for her significant scholarly achievements, as well as her influential role in the CEE department’s educational programs and students’ academic lives. Heald is an international leader in biosphere-atmosphere interactions, aerosol sources and transformations, and the connections between atmospheric chemistry and climate. She is rooted at the intersection of modeling and observational analysis, with a strong emphasis on the integration of the two. Her work has led to groundbreaking studies that involve the observations of atmosphere from a range of scales including ground stations, aircraft campaigns, and satellite sensors with global models of chemistry and climate. During her time in CEE, Heald has deepened study of the environmental impacts of both particles and gases. This past January, she presented on the environmental impacts on global food security at the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to an audience of world leaders in business, policy, and academia.

Retsef Levi is the J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is a member of the Operations Management Group at Sloan and affiliated with the Operations Research Center. Before coming to MIT, he spent a year in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as the holder of the Goldstine Postdoctoral Fellowship. He received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Tel-Aviv University (Israel) in 2001, and a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University in 2005. Levi spent more than 11 years in the Israeli Defense Forces as an Officer in the Intelligence Wing and was designated as an Extra Merit Officer. After leaving the Military, Levi joined and emerging new Israeli hi-tech company as a Business Development Consultant.

Levi's current research is focused on the design of analytical data-driven decision support models and tools addressing complex business and system design decisions under uncertainty in areas, such as health and healthcare management, supply chain, procurement and inventory management, revenue management, pricing optimization and logistics. He is interested in the theory underlying these models and algorithms, as well as their computational and organizational applicability in practical settings. Levi is leading several industry-based collaborative research efforts with some of the major academic hospitals in the Boston area, such as Mass General Hospital (MGH), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Children’s Hospital, and across the US (e.g., Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NYC Prebyterian Hospital System and the American Association of Medical Colleges). Levi is the lead PI on an MIT contract with the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to develop systematic risk management approach to address risk related to economically motivated adulterations of food and drug products manufactured in China. He has also been involved in developing operational risk and process safety management methodologies for various organizations, in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and oil industries. Levi received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development award, the 2008 INFORMS Optimization Prize for Young Researchers and the 2013 Daniel H. Wagner Prize.

Alexis H. Bateman is a Research Associate at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics. Her current research focuses on environmentally sustainable supply chains and urban logistics. Dr. Bateman received her Ph.D. in Planning, Policy and Design and Masters in Urban Planning at the University of California, Irvine. Her doctoral studies focused on environmental governance and urban planning through field work in major Southeast Asian cities. She co-authored a book on environmental governance of global regional seas and published several articles on environmental management. Dr. Bateman's previous professional work includes working with the City of Santa Ana Green Program, ISTEA projects with the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA), and the urban redevelopment plan for the Los Angeles River Revitalization Plan.

Dr. Bateman is the founder and director of the MIT Responsible Supply Chain Lab, which aims to examine the past, current, and potential future practices of sustainability in supply chain management across various industries, and develop applied models for businesses to effectively implement comprehensive strategies to improve supply chain management and control practices.

Rohit Karnik is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the Microfluidics and Nanofluidics Research Group. He obtained his B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay in 2002, and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2006 under the guidance of Prof. Arun Majumdar. After postdoctoral work with Prof. Robert Langer at MIT, he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT in 2007. His research focuses on the physics of micro- and nanofluidic flows and design of micro- and nanofluidic devices for applications in healthcare, energy systems, and biochemical separation and analysis. Among other honors, he is a recipient of the Institute Silver Medal (IIT Bombay, 2002), NSF Career Award (2010), Keenan Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education (2011), DOE Early Career Award (2012), and IIT Bombay Young Alumni Achiever Award (2014).

Amos Winter is the Ratan N. Tata Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. His research focuses on machine and product design for developing and emerging markets. Prof. Winter earned a BS from Tufts University (2003) and an MS (2005) and PhD (2011) from MIT, all in mechanical engineering.