Breakout - Energy & Sustainability Session

Justin Weber received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in 2009 and has been working at NETL since then. Justin is involved in numerous projects spread across both the computational and experimental domains with multiphase flow as a commonality. Current projects include development of a graphical user interface for MFIX (MFIX-GUI), Chemical Looping Combustion, and cold flow experimental measurement techniques. Specifically, Justin has experience with MFIX, CPFD’s Barracuda, Cantera, Python, VTK, Blender, Electrical Capacitance Volume Tomography (ECVT), image analysis, NETL’s 30cm pilot scale cold flow circulating fluidized bed (CFB), and NETL’s 50kW_th integrated Chemical Looping Reactor (CLR).

Dr. Harris read physics at Oxford University, graduating in 1979 and completing a doctorate in theoretical physics there in April 1983. After postdoctoral work at Edinburgh University in the area of percolation theory he joined Shell at the end of 1985. He has carried out research in a variety of subjects in both the upstream and downstream parts of Shell. From late 2001 to mid-2014 he was involved with Shell’s Unconventional Oil (now Unconventional Technologies) group and its predecessors, in Houston and Canada. He now works in storage and containment, addressing issues varying from induced seismicity due to fluid injection and production, to CO₂ storage. He is currently based in The Hague, The Netherlands. He has been visiting professor in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London since 2001, spending a total of about four weeks per year at the College.

A faculty member at the University of New Mexico since 1988 and a Fellow of the IEEE since 2002, Dr. Schamiloglu is an active researcher in the Applied Electromagnetics Group. The thrust of his research has been studying beam-wave interactions in high power sources of coherent electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetic effects on electronics, and related areas. He has co-edited one book and co-authored another on this topic. He has published over 130 refereed journal articles and his work has been cited over 4300 times. His h-index is 29. He was been Principal Investigator on grants and contracts for over $29M. He is a recipient of a 2011, 2012, and a 2013 UNM.STC Creativity Award. He was selected as a University of New Mexico Academic Leadership Fellow for 2013-2015. He was awarded the 2013 IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society’s Richard F. Shea Distinguished Member Award, the 2014 IEC “1906 Award” Recognizing an Expert’s Exceptional Contributions, and the 2015 IEEE NPSS PPST Peter Haas Award. He serves on the External Advisory Board for Sandia National Laboratories’ Radiation Effects/High Energy Density Science Foundation, on the Air Force Research Laboratory’s High Energy Density Plasmas Program’s External Review Panel, and on the Board of Visitors for the Army’s extramural basic research program in electronics (ARO).

Dr. Arturo Bronson graduated in Metallurgical Engineering in 1970 from The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), and completed his Masters at UTEP in 1972. In 1977, he received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in metallurgical engineering with an emphasis in high temperature thermodynamics and immediately joined the faculty at the University of Arizona. At the University of Arizona, he developed a corrosion research effort along with his undergraduate and graduate teaching in thermodynamics, kinetics and chemical metallurgy. After he moved to the University of Texas at El Paso in 1983, he developed a strong research group in corrosion and high temperature research and became the Director of the Materials Center for Synthesis and Processing from 1995 to 2000 with fifteen faculty and approximately 32 students/year. He was also program director in the Division of Human Resource Development of the Education Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1993. The main thrusts of Arturo Bronson’s research have focused in the chemical interactions of high temperature materials at 1000-1800°C. Professor Bronson also investigates corrosive wear, a relatively new research area, using the concepts of electrochemistry, surface deformation, and material microstructure, as well as infusing statistics and mathematical modeling through an interdisciplinary approach to aid in predicting material behavior. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has continually supported his research since 1984 with additional funds acquired from the Air Force Materials Laboratory, NASA, Army Research Office, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Professor Arturo Bronson's teaching methodology and philosophy emphasize the development of the understanding of basic concepts as applied to solving current scientific and engineering challenges. Professor Bronson has used the materials research laboratory with undergraduate and graduate students working and learning together to reinforce the application of basic concepts (e.g., thermodynamics, kinetics and transport phenomena). An achievable goal is that for every graduate student, an undergraduate is associated with him or her to support university research -- a practice initiated by Professor Bronson at the university and now integrated into the university education of scientists and engineers. In 2003, he was awarded the Men in Science Award for his excellence in teaching and research in materials science and engineering from the Quality Education for Minorities Network. Arturo, active in the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, was 1997 chair of the editorial board for the premier publication in metallurgy, Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B. He is also active in the Electrochemical Society and the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE) for which he served as symposium chair of the conference on “Techniques for Corrosion Measurement.” He has served on several NSF review panels primarily for the Division of Human Resource Development and Division of Materials Research. Arturo was appointed (1997-2000) to the Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering (CEOSE), an Advisory Committee to the Director of NSF; in 1998, he served as chair of CEOSE. He was appointed to NSF’s Advisory Committee for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (10/1999-9/2002) and NSF awarded him with an outstanding service award.

Dr. Jorge Muñoz received his B.S. in Physics and Applied Mathematics (double major) from The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in 2007, his Ph.D. in Materials Science from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2013, followed by employment at Intel Corporation. He started as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at UTEP in September 2018.

Jorge received a Gates Millennium Scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to attend UTEP. During his time as an undergrad he was active in the Society of Physics Students and worked with Prof. Jorge López on nuclear physics research. Together they won the Robert S. Hyer Undergraduate Research Award from the Texas Section of the American Physical Society (APS). He also spent summers doing research with Profs. Daniel Smith at South Carolina State University, Tom Witten at the University of Chicago, and Brent Fultz and Olivier Delaire at Caltech.

For graduate studies at Caltech he joined the group of Prof. Brent Fultz supported by the Gates Millennium Scholarship. His thesis research was on the phonon thermodynamics of several iron alloys, in particular how changes in the electronic structure of the material affect the phonon behavior. These changes were studied experimentally using x-ray and neutron inelastic scattering measurements at user facilities in national laboratories such as Argonne and Oak Ridge, and computationally using Density Functional Theory (DFT) electronic structure calculations. During this time he was the graduate student representative of the National Society of Hispanic Physicists.

At Intel, Jorge joined the group of Fellow Kelin Kuhn in Components Research and performed multiscale modeling (from DFT to Finite Element) to investigate the feasibility of using magnetic nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) for low voltage computation. He then joined Algorithms Pathfinding where he invented new machine learning methods and used them to predict the dynamics of computer networks and technological innovation networks. Intel has patented in several countries the intellectual property generated by Jorge. During this time he served in the Intel Artificial Intelligence Software Patent Committee, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Industry Liaison Subcommittee and was elected as a member-at-large of the APS Forum on Physics and Society.