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Hanley Sustainability Institute

Sustainable Technologies Scholars

Below you can find scholars whose work would help us ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all, build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, foster innovation and ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns: 

David Ashley

David's professional interests in large-scale, complex capital projects include energy efficient design, lean construction processes and natural ecosystem restoration. His primary focus on project risk management helps ensure that these major projects achieve their performance and sustainability goals.

David Ashley's bio
Justin Biffinger

Justin's sustainability interests involve understanding and manipulating Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes to remediate and recover metal ions from wastewater streams, fabricate fuels cells using electrochemically active bacteria, demonstrate biochemical pathways used in the dark fixation of carbonates in saltwater, design and formulate next generation anti-biofouling polymeric coatings, and create environmentally friendly enzyme-based polymer degradation formulations.

Justin Biffinger's bio
Omer Bilgin

Omer's sustainability interests are sustainable structures, foundations and geomaterials under various loading and environmental conditions.

Omer Bilgin's bio
Robert Brecha

Robert has been publishing research related to sustainability for the past decade, ranging from topics of fossil fuel availability and how this impacts climate change scenarios, to building energy efficiency scenarios and the integration of fluctuating renewable energy resources into existing power systems. Most recently, his focus has been on access to and consumption of energy in developing countries and the connections between energy use and Sustainable Development Goal targets.

Robert Brecha's bio
Dong Cao

Dong works on renewable energy, energy efficiency, electric vehicles and electrified airplane systems.

Dong Cao's bio
Ying-Ju Tessa Chen

Ying-Ju has interests in sustainability due to her broad interdisciplinary network from a variety of fields such as mathematics, ergonomics and safety, computer science, information systems, business analytics, healthcare and engineering.

Ying-Ju Tessa Chen's bio
Andrew Chiasson

Andrew's interests in sustainability lie with high performance buildings, which encompasses cost-effectiveness, energy efficiency, safety and security, accessibility, functionality, occupant comfort and productivity and historic preservation and aesthetics of the built environment.

Andrew Chiasson's bio
Jun-Ki Choi

Jun-Ki's sustainability interests are in sustainable engineering design and manufacturing, life cycle management (LCM) and assessment (LCA), energy policy and systems modeling, macroeconomic energy modeling, and entrepreneurial mindset learning.

Jun-Ki Choi's bio
Amy Ciric

She has worked on heat integration in chemical manufacturing, optimization techniques for waste minimization and the development of alternative refrigeration technologies using environmentally benign materials. Her current interests are in sustainable and resilient food systems and farming practices. 

Amy Ciric's bio
Joseph Duggan

Joseph is an economist interested in market design and regulation, particularly with respect to the study of wholesale electricity markets. As renewable generation becomes increasingly common, this poses certain challenges in rethinking existing market designs in light of these technologies. Economics can help us better understand important aspects of these challenges, while the unique problems raised by renewable integration generate questions that can better inform our economic models.

Joseph Duggan's bio
David Dunn

David's interests are in researching and transitioning sustainable energy solutions. Within the Power and Energy Division at UDRI is research developing and improving sustainable energy generation, storage and distribution approaches.

David Dunn's bio
Giacomo Flora

Giacomo's interests are in pollution formation and cleaner burning fuels. His work embraces combustion studies on alternative transportation fuels to identify chemical formation pathways for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and soot. More recently, his interests extended to the optimization of sulfur removal processes from aviation fuels.

Giacomo Flora's bio
Anya Galli Robertson

Anya's research centers on social and political debates about clean energy and climate change. Her most recent work includes qualitative analysis of the discourse around coal-fired power and the 2016 election and content analysis of energy policy debates in Ohio.

Anya Galli Robertson's bio
Erin Gibbemeyer

Erin's Interests include analysis of complex systems for multiple sustainability metrics, optimization in the design of sustainable systems and sustainability education.

Erin Gibbemeyer's bio
Kevin Hallinan

Kevin's interests in sustainability include the following: equitable distribution of the benefits of sustainability, big data approaches for reducing building related energy consumption and increasing the penetration of renewable energy, and broadening the participation of women and under-represented minorities in energy related jobs.

Kevin Hallinan's bio
Umesh Haritashya

Umesh's research includes studying cryosphere around the world to determine the sustainable future of glacier and water resources along with natural hazards in the mountainous environment. He uses satellite remote sensing, field-collected data, mathematical modeling and artificial intelligence techniques.

Umesh Haritashya's bio
Ben Hazen

Works across disciplines in areas related to Supply Chain Sustainability, from sustaining fleets of aging aircraft in his Air Force career to sustaining communities that are part of our global supply chains. Ben's work experience and research interests began with examining the role of reverse logistics to improve economic and environmental sustainability. His current interests are related to Circular Economy and diverse supplier management, and he enjoys investigating any area related to the management and diffusion of social, environmental and economic sustainability practices. 

Ben Hazen's bio
Mark Jacobs

Studies innovations and lean practices in supply chains. In particular, focusing on how companies can better work together to reach common goals in the most effective and efficient manner. Recent studies from this broad theme of research include investigating the impacts of various product architectures, environmental responsiveness and worker issues such as psychological safety, organizational communication and learning.

Mark Jacobs' bio
David Johnson

David's interests in sustainability include the areas of alternative and renewable energy sources, increased efficiency in chemical processes through well-designed catalysts and alternative fuels and lubricants, including biofuels, biolubricants and synthetic alternatives. He also is interested in alternative refrigerants with low GWP and ODP.

David Johnson's bio
Moshan Kahandawala

Moshan's interests are in energy and environmental sustainability. On the energy front, most of his work has been on bioenergy, biofuel, waste to energy and alternative energy technologies such as solar and hydrogen production. On the environmental side, most of his interests and work have been identifying opportunities for waste disposal and repurposing and for pollutant formation, mitigation and remediation.

Moshan Kahandawala's bio
Brad Kallenberg

Sustainability is both a material and a moral issue. On the material side, Brad teaches engineering ethics with an eye to sustainability as related to engineering and manufacturing (extraction of raw materials, production and use of energy, our cultural addiction to petroleum-based plastic, etc.). On the moral side, his research in virtue ethics deals, in part, with a kind of cultural moral myopia that prevents us from seeing and attending to the urgency of climate change and its fallout.

Brad Kallenberg's bio
Suki Kwon

As a working designer and an educator, Suki has been exploring various media in her efforts to fuse nature and design. Her long-standing interest in using traditional Korean designs led her to her interest in Korean traditional crafts and natural hand-dyeing techniques. She's been working with traditional natural dye techniques and incorporated into her own installational textile art and liturgical banner design work.

Suki Kwon's bio
Eric Lang

Eric's interests include renewable energy in all forms (wind, solar, biomass, ethanol, biodiesel), regenerative agriculture (he has a 10-acre organic farm/orchard) and biochar production and use. He also is an electric-vehicle enthusiast with three EVs including an electric tractor.

Eric Lang's bio
Robert Liang

Robert's interests relating to sustainability include geological hazards management, construction materials recycling and sustainable geotechnology.

Robert Liang's bio
Paul McManamon

Paul's interests involve where optics and photonics interact with sustainability including autonomous vehicles, lidars for oil, gas and water exploration, monitoring fracking for safety and environment, plus solar cells and monitoring wind around wind turbines.

Paul McManamon's bio
Alex Morgan

Alex’s research interests in sustainability focus on ensuring fire-safety performance against current and new fire risk scenarios in a changing climate and built environment. This includes development of new environmentally friendly flame retardant materials as well as enabling the design and implementation of recyclable/sustainable fire-safe materials.

Alex Morgan's bio
Rydge Mulford

Rydge develops passive technologies that enable sustainable building thermal control. He is also interested in exploring the impact of basic behavioral changes as a method to improve energy conservation.

Rydge Mulford's bio
Van Tam Nguyen

Van is interested in using computer vision and deep learning methods for environmental data analysis. The processed data include texts, images and videos. He has 15-plus years of working experience in research and industrial sectors.

Van Tam Nguyen's bio
Raul Ordonez

Raul brings his expertise in mathematical systems theory, systems analysis and feedback control design to the analysis and simulation of social systems. He is particularly interested in teaching mathematical systems theory to a large audience in order to help students better understand the connections between this body of knowledge and a multiplicity of social issues and environmental phenomena with a focus on sustainable development. Raul believes the powerful engineering and scientific tools available to us should be broadly applied to try to better understand and solve social and environmental challenges via a methodical study of policy-making.

Raul Ordonez's bio
Joseph Saliba

Joseph's focus is in rethinking sustainable design, not just in civil infrastructures but every design.

Joseph Saliba's bio
Aaron Sathyanesan

As a neuroscientist, Aaron and his team work on problems at the intersection of child health and brain development. Incorporating the Indian practice of "Jugaad" or frugal engineering, his team also develops open-source biomedical technology to enable sustainable research and development.

Aaron Sathyanesan's bio
Andrew Schrader

Andrew is interested in developing sustainable, solar-thermal energy and thermal sciences technological solutions in support of humanitarian challenges. He said these technologies must be developed while accounting for real-world economic and political systems, societal norms and individual responsibility.

Andrew Schrader's bio
Todd Smith

Todd is interested in all aspects of sustainable systems, with a special interest in alternative energy solutions and the science of climate change.

Todd Smith's bio
Elias Toubia

Elias is interested in the sustainability of construction materials and integrating fire safety and sustainability in material selection.

Elias Toubia's bio
Miranda van Iersel

Miranda is interested in sustainability in relation to the interaction of light with the environment, specifically the atmosphere (air) and ocean, rivers and lakes (water). This includes optical detection of microplastics in water, atmospheric turbulence around wind turbines, monitoring air pollution and access to fast internet through free space optical communication.

Miranda van Iersel's bio
Erick Vasquez

Erick is interested in developing value-added products from waste materials by using green chemistry approaches.

Erick Vasquez's bio
Takahiro Yamada

Takahiro's interest and research areas include chemical and electrochemical conversion of CO2 to hydrocarbons, hydrogen production, storage, and fuel cell technology, incineration and emission control technology and remediation of perfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) contamination of ground water, soil and biosludge. He recently obtained funding from the EPA for a study about PFAS and their contaminated biosludge incineration, an issue possibly confronting Dayton and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Takahiro Yamada's bio
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