PGS Fest Seminar: “Applying Biology to the Challenges of Sustainable Energy”

PGS Fest Seminar

Thursday, April 12th | Beginning at 3:30pm | BTI Auditorium | Happy Hour immediately after seminar (Official Facebook Event)

Seminar by: Dr. Buz Barstow, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University

Credit: Barstow Lab

Biology has the potential to make contributions to sustainable energy from the synthesis of advanced materials for construction and transportation to ultra-low-cost, high-efficiency solar power.

Advances in sustainable energy enabled by applied biology could have a transformative effect on human health by mitigating the effects of climate change, revolutionizing access to energy, and improving air and water quality. If this can be realized, the impact of these advances could be large as those made by antibiotics, vaccines and recombinant protein drugs.

In this talk, Dr. Buz Barstow will outline his team’s plans to use applied biology to solve pressing problems in sustainable energy including facilitating the widespread adoption of battery energy storage; enabling the environmentally friendly extraction of rare earth elements for energy efficient electronics; producing better biofuels; increasing the efficiency of photosynthesis; and democratizing the creation of double-gene knockout collections to enable genome-wide genetic interaction studies in organisms useful for sustainable energy.

For more about Dr. Barstow’s research: http://barstow.bee.cornell.edu/research/