Industry sector: Education/Research, Government
Presidential Lectures on Clean Energy and Sustainability
Photonics Building Room 206 Auditorium, 8 Saint Mary's Street, Boston, MA
This lecture is no charge and open to the public.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
4:00 pm – 5:15 pm
Arun Majumdar, Director
Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy
US Department of Energy Registration Suggested
“ARPA-E: Addressing the Sputniks of our Generation”
The report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” proposed the creation of ARPA-E, which was later authorized and appropriated by Congress. The report suggested ARPA-E to be modeled after DARPA, which was created in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik. It was then felt that the US had lost its technological lead. The US now faces three Sputnik-like challenges: (a) energy security; (b) US technological lead; and (c) greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. In many cases, we as a nation are lagging behind and need to change course with fierce urgency. ARPA-E’s goal is to help catalyze this change by attracting the best minds to focus on the major technical challenges in this field and by stimulating technical and the entrepreneurial community to innovate on energy technologies. While ARPA-E is adopting many of the best practices from DARPA, there are key differences between the defense and energy sectors of our economy, which must be recognized in ARPA-E’s design. This talk will provide some thoughts of how we are putting its “DNA” together, and an outlook for the future.
Arun Majumdar became the first Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), the country’s only agency devoted to transformational energy research and development, in October 2009.
Location: Photonics Building Room 206 Auditorium, 8 Saint Mary's Street, Boston, MA