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Eva Ponce Executive Director, MITx MicroMasters in Supply Chain Management Director, Omnichannel Distribution Strategies
Introduced by Marcus Dahllof, Program Director, MIT Startup Exchange
The wireless energy future, Alex Gruzen, CEO, Witricity Managing energy asset infrastructure digitally, Fausto Morales, Data Scientist at Arundo Analytics (STEX25) Monitoring industrial equipment through IoT, Jon Garrity, Co-founder & CEO, TagUp (STEX25) Big-data image analysis for unconventional oil & gas reservoirs, Maren Cattonar, Co-founder, Automated-Analytics Mission control for Energy R&D labs, Siping Wang, CTO & co-founder, TetraScience (STEX25) What 3D printing of metal parts means for the energy industry, Duncan McCallum, CEO, Digital Alloys Soldier Nanotechnologies - generating energy on the fly, Dr. Veronika Stelmakh, Co-founder & CEO, Mesodyne
Desiree Plata
Senseable City Labs Umberto Fugiglando Research Manager & Partnerships Lead, MIT Senseable City Lab
Digital technologies are radically changing the way we understand, design, and ultimately live in cities. This is having an impact at different scales – from the single building to the scale of the metropolis. Spanning from urban mobility to biodiversity, from environmental quality to community wellbeing, we will address these issues from a critical point of view through some of the latest projects by the Senseable City Lab, a multi-disciplinary research group at MIT that is developing research in many cities across the globe.
Innovations at Interfaces: Energy & Sustainability to Biomedical Technologies Kripa Varanasi Professor, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering
Physico-chemical interactions at interfaces are ubiquitous across multiple industries, including energy, decarbonization, healthcare, water, agriculture, transportation, and consumer products. In this talk, Professor Varanasi summarizes how surface/interface chemistry, morphology, and thermal and electrical properties can be engineered across multiple length scales to achieve significant efficiency enhancements in a wide range of processes. These approaches involve both passive and active manipulation of interfaces.
Varanasi first describes a variety of slippery interfaces that can significantly reduce interfacial friction for efficient dispensing of viscous products, enhance thermal transport in heating and cooling systems, provide anti-icing solutions, and create self-healing barriers for protection against scaling. Active strategies are also discussed, such as engineering charge transfer to alter multiphase flows for applications like water harvesting, anti-dust systems for solar panels, and reducing agricultural runoff to address critical challenges at the energy-water and water-agriculture nexus. Varanasi highlights efforts in decarbonization and the energy transition, focusing on CO₂ capture and conversion as well as battery energy storage systems. These efforts include enhancing electrochemical and biological methods for CO₂ capture and conversion, with recent advancements in CO₂ capture from point sources and direct air capture (DAC), marine CO₂ removal via a pH-swing process using electroactive materials, and electrochemical CO₂ conversion to fuels, ethylene, and other valuable products. Additionally, Varanasi introduces a high-performance rechargeable battery energy storage solution that is free of lithium and cobalt, intrinsically non-flammable, and ideal for stationary storage applications, including utility grids, home storage, microgrids, data centers, warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and chemical plants.
In parallel, Varanasi discusses ongoing research in biomedical technologies, spanning biomanufacturing to ovarian cancer treatment. Surface engineering strategies are presented to prevent thrombosis and biofilm formation, tailor cell adhesion and protein adsorption, and enhance the biomanufacturing value chain. Inspired by slippery surface technologies, Varanasi introduces a novel methodology for subcutaneous injection of highly viscous biologics, expanding the range of injectable formulations and improving healthcare accessibility. Innovative approaches to protein separation via undersaturated crystallization, promoted through in-situ templating, are also described, enabling continuous biomanufacturing. Passive and active techniques for enhancing bioreactors by preventing foam buildup are detailed, with a non-invasive approach that eliminates the need for defoamers, preventing cell death caused by bubble rupture and optimizing reactor space utilization.
Throughout the talk, Varanasi addresses manufacturing and scale-up strategies, robust materials and processes, and entrepreneurial efforts to translate these technologies into impactful products and markets. Insights from the start-up companies co-founded by Varanasi are interwoven with these discussions.
Prof. Kulik will describe their efforts to accelerate the discovery of novel transition metal containing materials using machine learning. She will discuss how they have leveraged experimental data sets through both text mining and semantic embedding to uncover relationships between structure and function in molecular catalysts and metal-organic frameworks. Then she will describe how they have leveraged large datasets of synthesized materials to uncover those with novel function in polymer networks. She will describe how they demonstrate the success of their design strategy through macroscopically visible changes in network scale properties.
Kevin Desouza Professor of Business, Technology and Strategy Faculty of Business & Law, School of Management, Queensland University of Technology Leon Sandler Executive Director, MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation