NEES News

Albertus Appointed Associate Director of Maryland Energy Innovation Institute

Paul Albertus has been appointed the new associate director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute (MEI²), an institute housed within the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering created by the state to turn research breakthroughs by Maryland academic institutions into commercial, clean energy solutions that meet the needs of the state and its people. Albertus comes to the Clark School from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), where he was program director and helped initiate $100 million of funding towards new research projects, most of them electrochemical technologies.

“The A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland has numerous innovative and technically accomplished researchers who have already demonstrated exciting advances in energy technology. The ability to work with such experts, across numerous disciplines, is an exciting opportunity for me,” Albertus said.

Albertus completed his B.S.E. at the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, both in chemical engineering. Prior to ARPA-E, he worked at Bosch Research where, along with carrying out battery research, he helped set up the Bosch Energy Research Network, which provides energy-related research grants to universities and internships to students. His research interests include energy storage for transportation and stationary applications, energy conversion, and energy materials, with applications including lithium metal batteries, flow batteries, and electrolysis of water to form hydrogen and oxygen.

Albertus has many goals once he starts as associate director of MEI². One of his primary ambitions is research and education that can help Maryland meet its 2050 greenhouse gas reduction goal (an 80% reduction compared to 2006 levels), which he says “will require both rapid and deep changes in the way energy is produced, stored, and used across several sectors such as transportation and electricity generation.” Albertus says that the best way to accomplish these goals is “by bringing together members of academia, industry, government, and other organizations to translate scientific knowledge into real technologies that can be deployed commercially.”

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to the new associate director of MEI², Paul Albertus!

January 16, 2019