When: Wednesday, April 14, 2021 4:00 to 5:00 PM PT
Event Details or http://power.ieeesiliconvalley.org/ RSVP: Registration
Cost: Free: Registration required
Speaker: Dr. Jennifer Gerbi, Acting Director and Deputy Director for Technology, ARPA-E
Summary: The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the U.S. Department of Energy advances high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment. ARPA-E awardees are unique because they are developing entirely new ways to generate, store, and use energy.
ARPA-E empowers America’s energy researchers with funding, technical assistance, and market readiness. The agency’s rigorous program design, competitive project selection process, and active program management ensure thoughtful expenditures, with a focus on transformational energy projects that can be meaningfully advanced with a small amount of funding over a defined period. The foundational structure and culture at ARPA-E is crucial to this success.
Part of ARPA-E’s statutory mandate is to, “reduce energy-related emissions, including greenhouse gases” and to “improve the energy efficiency of all economic sectors”, and the agency’s funding opportunities focus on doing this by developing transformational technology solutions across the sustainability, efficiency and renewable energy spaces.
Many ARPA-E programs, particularly the DELTA, ELECTROFUELS, ENLITENED, FLECCS, MARINER, and MEITNER programs, as well as others, work to directly address the core mandate of ARPA-E. I will be providing an overview of these programs along with an overview of how the Agency operates in order to achieve sustainable energy solutions for the USA.
Bio: Dr. Jennifer Gerbi currently serves as the Deputy Director for Technology at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Dr. Gerbi leads the Agency’s development, launch, and execution of high-risk, high-reward energy R&D programs. Previously as a Program Director at the Agency, her programmatic focus at ARPA-E included improving the energy efficiency and management of buildings via advanced sensing systems and storage, novel insulating materials for windows, and renewable energy generation via photovoltaics.
Prior to joining ARPA-E, Gerbi worked at Dow Corning in multiple capacities. She started at the company in 2011 as a Program Leader in the company’s Business and Technology Incubator. In this role, Gerbi built and led a next-generation solar portfolio. Gerbi then managed a global team as a Business Builder, leading new business development for a lithium-ion battery program. Gerbi’s most recent role at Dow Corning was as an Applied Engineering and Technical Service Leader, where she led an electronics application engineering and development team, working directly with large global customers to enable technical solutions via silicones in consumer and crossover healthcare electronics markets.
From 2007 to 2011, Gerbi served as a Senior Materials Scientist at The Dow Chemical Company, focusing on the copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar technology effort, which included growing a small lab-scale environment into a commercial-scale effort within three years. Gerbi served her postdoctoral fellowship at Argonne National Laboratory, developing thin film diamond coatings for electronics and healthcare markets. She also worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois on novel diffusion barriers.
Dr. Gerbi holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also received an M.S. in Physics from the University of Virginia and a B.A. in Physics from Bard College.
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Steve Jordan
