NJIT's National Academy of Inventors Chapter Forges Alliances to Tackle Grand Challenges
Success in slowing global warming will depend on a web of motivated and productive partnerships among distinct groups: scientists modeling changes and devising the means to curb them, nimble enterprises and a workforce able to translate inventions into tools, informed policymakers and, perhaps most importantly, engaged communities.
It was in the spirit of forging these alliances that participants from academia, industry and government gathered at the inaugural forum of NJIT’s newly founded chapter of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), entitled “Sustainable Societies and Climate Change: The Quest for Sustainable Global Solutions,” held in late 2021.
Keynote speaker Karen Reif, the vice president of renewables and energy solutions at Public Service Enterprise Group, apprised the audience of the utility PSE&G’s near-term plans for replacing fossil fuel generation with existing nuclear power and renewable sources, as well as efficiency and alternative fuel vehicle programs for consumers designed to slow emissions and demand. The company is auditing 16 of NJIT’s buildings, for example, for efficiency upgrades.
Reif (below) said the company was “on the way to eliminating all fossil-fuel generation” by 2022 as part of its plan to provide carbon-free energy by 2030.
In two panel discussions, various stakeholders shared information about new scientific findings, the latest methods for monitoring and modeling changes on the ground, resiliency measures, clean energy programs, resources for technology translation and community engagement.
Mihri Ozkan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the state-designated “Climate Champion” at the University of California, Riverside who is an expert in battery technologies and manufacturing, outlined the capacities, costs and opportunities for improvement of a host of new and emerging climate technologies. Describing herself as a “fan of carbon capture at the source,” she detailed, for example, the costs of diverting CO2 from ethanol manufacturing ($10 per ton) and natural gas- and coal-fired plants ($60 per ton), while noting that it is not possible to capture all emissions that way.
In noting the importance of nanotchnology to decarbonization goals, Wunmi Sadik, a distinguished professor of chemistry at NJIT and chair of department, stressed that the technologies to "save, capture, convert, store, transmit and dissipate energy are all inherently nano."
Judith Sheft, executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Science, Innovation and Technology, promoted the commission’s online portal, Research with New Jersey, which provides small and start-up companies with a database of subject matter experts, equipment and technology at New Jersey universities, including NJIT.
Pallavi Madakasira, director of clean energy for the New Jersey Economic Development Authority NJEDA), touted jobs-creating programs such as the offshore wind facility now under construction at a port in Lower Alloways Creek, which will produce, assemble and then transport major components such as turbine blades and nacelles for installation in the Atlantic Ocean. She noted initiatives targeted at “overburdened communities” and small and minority businesses, such as financial incentives to purchase zero-emission medium duty trucks.
As he detailed clean energy programs, Upendra Chivikula, a commissioner on the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, described the board’s efforts to include low-and-moderate income families who are often must forego incentives that require up-front investments, such as installing solar panels. He added that it also remained a challenge to enlist support from the broader public for these initiatives.
“What’s missing is the engagement of the end-user… it’s a movement and must come from the grassroots,” he said, while urging universities to invest their time and credibility with the public in consumer education research to help further these goals.
Michel Boufadel, a distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering at NJIT, is working with collaborators on a “Community Intrinsic Resilience Index” that evaluates a municipality or county’s ability to prepare for, respond to and recover following a disruptive event. Their model assesses the impact of various levels of stress, such as the severity of a storm, on four areas: transportation, energy, health and socio-economics.
“How do we quantify this? We need numbers,” he noted, adding that “resilience may deviate from sustainability, because resilience requires redundancy, having more resources than you actually need… there has to be a balance.”
To attain sustainability, livability and equitability, “we often look for a silver bullet that will not exist. We need to think about technology portfolios that encompass new water technologies, new infrastructure, new materials, new energy systems and probably most of all, new transportation systems,” said Elie Bou-Zeid, is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University, where he is also the founding director of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Metropolis Project.
“I would argue that leading with equity is a way to make climate change actions stick. If they are acceptable to communities, that’s the key to ensuring they’re not voted out at the next election,” said Robin Leichenko, co-director of the Rutgers Climate Institute and a professor of geography, who noted that equity must be part of “climate change planning.”
“We really need to improve our prediction capacity of ecosystems’ response to climate variability,” said Xiaonan Tai, an assistant professor of biology, who noted the complexity of these systems, in which climate change, hydrology, the carbon cycle and vegetation dynamics all interact.
D. Scott Mackay, a professor and chair of the Department of Geography at the University of Buffalo, recommended “realistic” climate change models that incorporate plant genomics to show how plants will respond to novel environmental conditions and where they are likely to thrive.
Sharing science in a world of niche expertise and connecting researchers with policymakers and industry partners is a primary goal of the university’s NAI workshops.
As panel moderator Govi Rao, president and CEO of the Carbon Group Global, put it, “The gap between data, strategy and policy deployment is as wide as the Amazon. We need to get policymakers educated yesterday, not tomorrow.”
“We want create an open forum to facilitate strategic stakeholder partnerships, because we can’t accomplish our goals without them,” said Atam Dhawan, NJIT’s senior vice provost for research and the director of NJIT’s NAI chapter and an NAI Fellow. “We also need to inject urgency into the search for sophisticated data, near-term technological solutions and strategies for coping in an altered world.”
At the chapter’s inauguration last year, Dhawan hailed “a giant step forward in promoting research and innovation towards entrepreneurship and technology translation.”
The chapter will promote translational research and its commercialization through campus R&D programs, grants, clubs and acceleration programs; invention-focused networking and educational activities, such as workshops and seminars on innovation and intellectual property development; and mentoring and advising services to faculty and student inventors on further development of IP assets.
To further research collaborations on and off the NJIT campus, the forum was followed by the introduction of university’s new faculty and the recipients of NJIT-funded seed grants for early-stage research.
To name a few, these researchers include Kerri-lee Chintersingh, an assistant professor of chemical and materials engineering, who is interested, among other areas, in the use of nanomaterials to minimize the formation of atmospheric pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxides in industrial gas waste streams; Rayan H. Assaad, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, whose interests include, among others, the modeling, simulation and optimization of infrastructure and construction operations; and Hua Wei, an assistant professor of informatics who focuses on machine learning training methods aimed at facilitating growing autonomous vehicle traffic, adopting traffic signal controls based on traffic flow, and many types of smart city and cyber-physical systems, such as smart retail.
