Miaofang Chi
Miaofang Chi joined Duke University in 2023 and holds a joint position as a Corporate Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She earned her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, Davis, in 2008, conducting her thesis research at Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Her research focuses on interfacial charge transfer and ion transport in energy and quantum materials, advancing electron microscopy techniques. Dr. Chi is a Fellow of the Microscopy Society of America (MSA) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). She has received the Burton Medal (2016), the Kurt Heinrich Award (2019), the ORNL Director’s Award (2015, 2021), and has been named a Highly Cited Researcher (2020–2023).
Olivier Delaire
Olivier Delaire is an associate professor of the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. The Delaire group investigates atomistic transport processes of energy and charge, and thermodynamics in energy materials. We use a combined experimental and computational approach to understand and control microscopic energy transport for the design of next-generation materials, in particular for sustainable energy applications. Current materials of interest include superionic conductors, photovoltaics, thermoelectrics, ferroelectrics/multiferroics, and metal-insulator transitions. Our group’s studies provide fundamental insights into atomic dynamics and elementary excitations in condensed-matter systems (phonons, electrons, spins), their couplings and their effects on macroscopic properties. We probe the microscopic underpinnings of transport and thermodynamics properties by integrating neutron and x-ray scattering, optical spectroscopy, and thermal characterization, together with quantum-mechanical computer simulations.
Leanne Gilbertson is an Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University. Before joining the faculty at Duke in 2023, Dr. Gilbertson was an Associate Professor and Fulton C. Noss Faculty Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh where she began her faculty career in 2015. Prior to that, Dr. Gilbertson was a postdoctoral associate in the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale University. Her research focused on bridging length scales – from the molecular to systems-level – to build sustainable design guidelines for engineered nanomaterials. Dr. Gilbertson received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, supported through an NSF Graduate Research and EPA STAR Fellowships. She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry with a minor in education from Hamilton College, after which she spent several years as a secondary school teacher before pursuing her graduate degree.
Dr. Gilbertson’s research aims to inform sustainable design of emerging materials and technologies proposed for use in areas at the nexus of the environment and public health. Her group is currently engaged in projects tackling drinking water disinfection, resource intensive crop production, and chemical conversion of greenhouse gases. The materials that underlie the solutions to these challenges are designed and developed with the goal of using inherently non-hazardous feedstocks and low resource intensive synthesis processes, maximizing performance during the intended use, and minimizing adverse impacts across the life cycle. Her research integrates life cycle assessment to (i) assess environmental impacts of the material and technology systems developed in her lab, and (ii) inform decisions to improve their overall sustainability. Dr. Gilbertson’s research has been recognized and is supported by the National Science Foundation, including the CAREER award, the 3M non-tenured faculty award, and the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award.
Heileen (Helen) Hsu-Kim is a Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Duke University, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2005. Prior to joining Duke, Dr. Hsu-Kim completed her B.S. degree in Environmental Engineering at MIT, and M.S./Ph.D. degrees in Environmental Engineering at UC-Berkeley. Dr. Hsu-Kim’s expertise area is aquatic geochemistry and her research focuses on trace metals and metalloids in the environment. As part of her current research activities, Dr. Hsu-Kim studies geological waste streams such as coal mine drainage and coal combustion residuals as a resource for rare earth elements and other critical metals. Her work aims to characterize the chemical forms of critical metals and host mineral phases as they inform waste-to-resource applications. Her team leverages advanced X-ray spectroscopy techniques to identify chemical forms at the nanometer and micrometer scales. Dr. Hsu-Kim’s group also studies hydrometallurgical methods and liquid membrane separations for extracting rare earths from waste residuals. Her team is developing a national inventory of coal combustion residuals and their chemical properties based on historical energy supply datasets.
In addition to her work on critical metals, Dr. Hsu-Kim studies trace metals and metalloids in the environment and biogeochemical processes that influence their transformations and distribution in ecosystems. Her group is developing methods to quantify personal exposures of chemical mixtures from an individual’s environment. In addition to these research activities, Dr. Hsu-Kim directs the Trace Element Analysis User Resource Facility at Duke University. She is the Director of Graduate Studies for Civil & Environmental Engineering at Duke and is currently an Associate Editor for Environmental Science & Technology.
Dalia Patiño-Echeverri is the Gendell Family Associate Professor of Energy Systems and Public Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. She explores, assesses, and proposes technological, policy, and market approaches to pursue environmental sustainability, affordability, reliability, and resiliency in the energy sector.
Most of her research focuses on the decisions regulators and private actors must make regarding capital investment and operations in the electricity industry and quantifying the value of flexibility in multiple dimensions. Her work uses operations research tools to account for path dependencies, uncertainty, and risk tradeoffs ubiquitous in the energy system. She served as the PI of the ARPA-E-funded GRACE project, which developed a novel Energy Management System (EMS) to improve short-term electric power systems operations by estimating and considering the risk posed by different grid assets. Now, her research lab is working to adapt this EMS to micro-grid needs.
Prof. Patino-Echeverri has a Ph.D. degree in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University and for more than 15 years, has taught two courses for the Masters Program at Duke: ENVIRON/ENERGY716 Quantitative Modeling for Energy Systems Analysis and ENVIRON/ENERGY717 Introduction to Markets for Electric Power.
Dan Richter
Dan Richter is a professor of soils and forest ecology at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Richter’s research and teaching links soils with ecosystems and the wider environment, most recently Earth scientists’ Critical Zone. He focuses on how humanity is transforming Earth’s soils from natural to human-natural systems, specifically how land-uses alter soil processes and properties on time scales of decades, centuries, and millennia. Richter’s book, Understanding Soil Change (Cambridge University Press), co-authored with his former PhD student Daniel Markewitz (Professor at University of Georgia), explores a legacy of soil change across the Southern Piedmont of North America, from the acidic soils of primary hardwood forests that covered the region until 1800, through the marked transformations affected by long-cultivated cotton, to contemporary soils of rapidly growing and intensively managed pine forests. Richter and colleagues work to expand the concept of soil as the full biogeochemical weathering system of the Earth’s crust, ie, the Earth’s belowground Critical Zone, which can be tens of meters deep. The research examines decadal to millennial changes in the chemistry and cycling of soil C, N, P, Ca, K, Mg, and trace elements B, Fe, Mn, Cu, Be, Zr, and Zn across full soil profiles as deep at 30-m.
Since 1988, Richter has worked at and directed the Long-Term Calhoun Soil-Ecosystem Experiment (LTSE) in the Piedmont of South Carolina, a collaborative study with the USDA Forest Service that quantifies how soils form as natural bodies and are transformed by human action, and a study that has grown to become an international model for such long-term soil and ecosystem studies. In 2005, Richter and students initiated the first comprehensive international inventory project of the world’s LTSEs, using an advanced-format website that has networked metadata from 250 LTSEs. The LTSEs project has held three workshops at Duke University, NCSU’s Center for Environmental Farming Systems, and the USDA Forest Service’s Calhoun Experimental Forest and Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, hosting representatives from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. Richter’s 60-year old Long Term Calhoun Soil and Ecosystem Experiment is linked to similar experiments and platforms around the world via the ‘Long-Term Soil-Ecosystem Experiments Global Inventory’, assembled by Dan Richter, Pete Smith, and Mike Hofmockel.”He is an active member of the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Working Group on the Anthropocene. Richter has written in the peer-reviewed literature about all of these projects, and in November 2014 his soils research at the Calhoun and his soils teaching were featured in Science magazine.
Avner Vengosh is a Distinguished Professor of Environmental Quality at Duke University. He is also the Chair of the Division of Earth and Climate Sciences at the Nicholas School of the Environment. Professor Vengosh and his team have studied the energy-water nexus, conducting pioneer research on the impact of hydraulic fracturing, coal ash disposal, and critical minerals mining on the quantity and quality of water resources. His team has also investigated the sources and mechanisms of water contamination in numerous countries across the globe, focusing the mechanisms that control the occurrence of geogenic contaminants such as arsenic, fluoride, boron, hexavalent chromium, radium, and uranium. His group has been developed novel geochemical and isotope tracers that are used to delineate sources and mechanisms of water contamination. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) and International Association of Geochemistry (IAGC). In 2019, 2020 and 2021 he was recognized as one of the Web of Science Highly Cited Researchers. He served as an Editor of GeoHealth and on the editorial board of Environmental Science and Technology. He has published 183 scientific papers in leading international journals. His recent cross-disciplinary book “Water Quality Impacts of the Energy-Water Nexus” (Cambridge University Press, 2022) provides an integrated assessment of the different scientific and policy tools around the energy-water nexus. In 2024 he received the Geological Society of America’s Geology & Health Division Distinguished Career Award.
Erika Weinthal
Erika Weinthal is the John O. Blackburn Distinguished Professor of Environmental Policy at Duke University. She is Chair of the Environmental Social Systems Division in the Nicholas School of the Environment and a member of the Bass Society of Fellows. She specializes in global environmental politics and environmental security with an emphasis on water and energy. She is author of State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic Politics and International Politics in Central Asia (MIT Press 2002), which received the 2003 Chadwick Alger Prize and the 2003 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize. She co-authored Oil is not a Curse (Cambridge University Press 2010) and Water Quality Impacts of the Energy-Water Nexus (Cambridge University Press 2022). She has co-edited Water and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Shoring Up Peace (2014), The Oxford Handbook on Water Politics and Policy (Oxford University Press 2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics (2023). She was a founding Vice President of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Women Peacebuilders for Water Award under the auspices of “Fondazione Milano per Expo 2015.”