Cornell University

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Energy Engineering Seminar: Buz Barstow, Professor, Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University

Thursday, September 10, 2020 at 12:40pm to 1:30pm

Virtual Event

What is the Efficiency of Microbial Electrosynthesis?

The penetration of renewable electricity is increasing significantly across the world making low cost, large scale energy storage essential. At the same time, the need for CO2 sequestration and hydrocarbon fuels are likely to grow for decades to come. Photosynthesis gives a template for solar energy and CO2 storage at enormous scale, but its inefficiency sets the stage for competition between land for agriculture, wilderness and energy. Microbial electrosynthesis aims to beat the efficiency of photosynthesis by using electroactive microbes to combine electricity and microbial metabolism for solar and electrical energy storage. In this talk, I’ll be giving an overview of my team’s work on new tools for characterizing non-model microbes, the systems biology of electroactive microbes, and a new molecule to reactor theory that predicts the upper limits of efficiency of microbial electrosynthesis.

BIO: Buz Barstow is an applied physicist working on systems and synthetic biology and sustainable energy. For his graduate work at Cornell in Applied Physics, Buz made the first direct sub-angstrom correlation of protein structure and function using high-pressure X-ray crystallography. As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, he focused on the evolution of biological hydrogen production and the engineering of electroactive bacteria. As a fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton, Buz developed Knockout Sudoku, a technique that reduces the cost of genetic characterization of non-model microbes from millions to thousands of dollars. Here at Cornell, Buz’s lab is working on engineering microbes for bio-mining rare earth elements and microbial electrosynthesis. Buz is a recipient of William Nichols Findley Award, NIH National Research Service Award, and Burroughs-Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface and a finalist for the Gregorio Weber International Prize in Biological Fluorescence. 

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https://cornell.zoom.us/j/96109802380?pwd=aW9qcnlVd3B6R05iK1RxaWprTDljZz09

Meeting ID: 961 0980 2380

Passcode: 846755

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Event Type

Seminar

Departments

Engineering

Tags

energy institute

Website

https://energy.cornell.edu/energy-eng...

Contact E-Mail

bs798@cornell.edu

Contact Name

Brittney Snyder

Speaker Affiliation

Cornell University

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