School of Engineering
Showing 71-78 of 78 Results
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Joel Swisher
Adjunct Professor
BioJoel N. Swisher, PhD, PE, is Consulting Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, where he teaches graduate-level courses on greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation (covering technical and business strategies to manage GHG risks) and electric utility planning methods (covering supply and demand-side resources, resource integration and expansion planning). His current research at Stanford addresses the integration of plug-in vehicles with the power grid and the barriers and synergies related to metering, tariffs, load management, customer incentives, and charging infrastructure.
Dr. Swisher is also an independent consultant with over 30 years experience in research and consulting on many aspects of clean energy technology. He is an expert in energy efficiency technology and policy, carbon offsets and climate change mitigation, and electric utility resource planning and economics. He has consulted with numerous utilities, manufacturers and technology companies on resource planning, energy efficiency, vehicle electrification and clean energy deployment strategies. He has also helped consumer-oriented firms design strategies to expand simple cost-saving energy investment programs into brand-building corporate sustainability campaigns.
Dr. Swisher is a thought leader in several areas of clean energy technology and business strategy. As Director of Technical Services and CTO for Camco International, Dr. Swisher helped develop carbon offset projects in reforestation, agriculture, renewable energy and building energy efficiency, and he has authored emission inventories, baseline studies and monitoring and verification plans for multilateral banks and private offset buyers. Starting in 1989, Dr. Swisher performed seminal research on carbon offset baselines and technical and economic analysis of carbon offsets in the energy and land-use sectors.
Dr. Swisher was managing director of research and consulting at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), where he led RMI’s consulting team in work for numerous high-profile clients, including electric utilities and producers of goods ranging from semiconductor chips to potato chips. At RMI, he created the concept of the Smart Garage, which explores the energy system synergies in which vehicle electrification helps enable zero-emission vehicles and a cleaner power grid. He led an RMI team that convened an industrial consortium (including Alcoa, Johnson Controls, Google, etc.) to develop a new, lightweight, plug-in hybrid vehicle platform for Class 2 truck fleet applications. Collaborating with the design firm IDEO to conduct interdisciplinary design workshops, the RMI team initiated a working design to attract funding and move toward production, which proceeded as a spin-off company, Bright Automotive in Indiana.
Dr. Swisher holds a Ph.D. in Energy and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. He is a registered Professional Engineer and speaks five languages. He is author of over 100 professional publications including The New Business Climate: A Guide to Lower Carbon Emissions and Better Business Performance and a bilingual (English and Portuguese) textbook on energy efficiency program design and evaluation and integrated energy resource planning. -
William Abraham Tarpeh
Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, by courtesy, of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center Fellow, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment
BioReimagining liquid waste streams as resources can lead to recovery of valuable products and more efficient, less costly approaches to reducing harmful discharges to the environment. Pollutants in effluent streams can be captured and used as valuable inputs to other processes. For example, municipal wastewater contains resources like energy, water, nutrients, and metals. The Tarpeh Lab develops and evaluates novel approaches to resource recovery from “waste” waters at several synergistic scales: molecular mechanisms of chemical transport and transformation; novel unit processes that increase resource efficiency; and systems-level assessments that identify optimization opportunities. We employ understanding of electrochemistry, separations, thermodynamics, kinetics, and reactor design to preferentially recover resources from waste. We leverage these molecular-scale insights to increase the sustainability of engineered processes in terms of energy, environmental impact, and cost.
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Clyde Tatum
Obayashi Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus
BioTatum's teaching interests are construction engineering and technical construction. His research focuses on construction process knowledge and integration and innovation in construction.
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Leif Thomas
Professor of Earth System Science and, by courtesy, of Geophysics, of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Oceans
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPhysical oceanography; theory and numerical modeling of the ocean circulation; dynamics of ocean fronts and vortices; upper ocean processes; air-sea interaction.
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Adam Zsarnoczay
Research Engineer
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAdam's research focuses on disaster simulations that support multi-hazard risk assessment and management at a regional scale. His research interests include probabilistic natural hazard assessment, model development and calibration for structural response estimation and performance assessment, surrogate modeling and uncertainty quantification in large-scale, regional simulations, and using quantitative disaster simulations to support risk management and mitigation.
