Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Sustainability at the SAMSI Workshop



I had a very stimulating and intellectually engaging time at the SAMSI Engineering and Renewable Energy Workshop that took place recently in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

The presentations of invited speakers (almost all of them) have now been posted.


The organizer, Dr. Roger Ghanem, requested that I speak on Sustainability: Methodology so I did, but I also added some applications, including electric power supply chains, because, in my opinion, it is the applications that drive the development of new methodologies.

My presentation, in pdf format, can be directly downloaded here.

Each day we also had brainstorming sessions around several preselected themes.

I selected the Sustainability group, which was one of the number of working groups for purposes of discussions, and we had very lively discussions. One issue that we kept on coming back to was the relationship between resiliency and sustainability.

It was also great to see Dr. Miriam Heller and Dr. Priscilla Nelson, again, both of whom had been formerly at NSF, and were in the Sustainability discussion group with Dr. Heller as our leader.

I very much enjoyed the invited talks and even learned about material science and nuclear energy.

Overall, there were 120 registrants at this workshop, with participants even from Europe!