Member Profile
Daniel Schwartz
Environmental Innovation and Energy Entrepreneurship in Indian Country
Renewable energy offers outstanding rural development opportunities for communities across America. Indian Country combines some of the Nation’s most bountiful solar, wind, ocean, and forest resources,... More »
About Me
My research has two dimensions: (i) Traditional focused research and (ii) integrative energy research. (i) My focused research group in Seattle is called the “Electrochemical Materials and Interfaces Lab”. Our core activities seek to develop, characterize, and optimize the electrochemical materials and interfaces that underpin electrochemical energy conversion devices, photovoltaics, sensors, and microsystems. Current examples include work on water transport in fuel cell gas diffusion electrodes, protein-aided nucleation and growth of materials for photovoltaics and electrocatalysts, as well as microfabrication via electrodeposition. (ii) At the same time, as part of IGERT, I lead interdisciplinary energy research projects in collaboration with Native American communities. These applied projects expose students to the full energy life-cycle, from extraction of natural resources to the logistics and engineering of systems that convert and distribute those resources to the market. A key element is learning directly about the impacts of energy development on the environment and communities, helping IGERT students form a personal understanding of “sustainable societies”.
