Skip to main content
Climate
Search

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
    • For Educators
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search
MIT

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
    • For Educators
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search
VideoNovember 16, 2018

Wulff Lecture: Hey, Atoms: What Have You Done for Me Lately?

    Description

    Understanding, inventing, and engineering mechanisms and materials for energy production, energy storage, and energy transport are among the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Materials-driven advances are key to technologies that counter the deleterious environmental and political impacts of the world's long-standing reliance on fossil fuels. Current renewable energy conversion and storage technologies are either too expensive or too inefficient or both. Materials science and engineering is at the core of the energy challenge: many key mechanisms that convert and store energy are dominated by the intrinsic properties of the active materials involved. Our imperative is to predict, identify, and manufacture new materials as comprehensively and rapidly as possible to enable game-changing forward leaps rather than our current path of incremental advances. This lecture will discuss the impact of materials design on the energy world.

    The Wulff Lecture is an introductory, general audience, entertaining lecture that aims to educate, inspire, and encourage MIT undergraduates to take up study of materials science and engineering and related fields. The entire MIT community, particularly freshmen, is invited to attend. The Wulff Lecture honors the late Professor John Wulff, a skilled, provocative, and entertaining teacher who conceived of a new approach to teaching general chemistry and inaugurated the popular freshman subject, 3.091 Introduction to Solid State Chemistry.

    by MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering - DMSE
    Topics
    Education
    Energy

    Related Posts

    PodcastMay 7, 2025

    Hydrogen beneath our feet

    MIT Energy Initiative
    PostMay 2, 2025

    MIT Sustainable Design Lab and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Launch New...

    MIT Climate Policy Center
    View of the Boston, Massachusetts skyline and the Charles River from the Cambridge side of the Charles.
    PostMay 1, 2025

    SLB joins the MIT.nano Consortium

    MIT News
    Left to right: Lalitha Venkataramanan, scientific advisor and SLB research center manager; Kelly Gavin, MIT.nano consortium manager; Vladimir Bulović, MIT.nano director and the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technologies at MIT; and Smaine Zeroug, research director and SLB ambassador to MIT.
    PodcastApril 24, 2025

    Removing fossil fuels from industrial processes

    MIT Energy Initiative

    MIT Climate News in Your Inbox

     
     

    MIT Groups Log In

    Log In

    Footer

    • About
    • Terms & Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • Accessibility
    • Contact
    MIT Climate Project
    MIT
    Communicator Award Winner
    Communicator Award Winner