The Cornell Club of San Diego
invites you to be part of a very special faculty speaking event featuring
Frank DiSalvo
John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science and interim head of the new Cornell Center for Sustainable Future
speaking on
"What is Cornell Doing about Sustainability?"
What You Will Learn
It is increasingly apparent to the world that we face numerous challenges in this century that result in part from our past successes: increasing energy use, challenges to energy supply, environmental stress, global warming, rapidly increasing population, unequal access to resources and opportunity, declining global water quality and availability, etc. Addressing these interconnected issues may be the most important challenge of this century. Sustainable activities, those that meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, must be invented or designed, understood, adopted and refined.
What can Cornell do to help establish a sustainable world? What is Cornell already doing? What can we do better (especially with the involvement of the broader Cornell community)? How does an education and research institution optimize its impact on the world? As a partial answer, I will talk about the new Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future.
About the Speaker
Frank DiSalvo received his B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1966 and his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1971. He then joined the research staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he later headed several research departments. In 1986 he moved to the Department of Chemistry at Cornell University, where he has taught freshman chemistry for engineers, a course in scientific literacy for non-scientists (Strategies in Science: The World of Chemistry), a junior level laboratory in instrumental analysis, senior level inorganic chemistry, and a graduate course in solid state chemistry. He has been interested in and involved in a variety of educational outreach programs at Cornell and loves to do Chemistry Demos for school groups and others. In 1991 he was awarded the American Physical Society International Prize for New Materials and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Materials Research Society. In 1996 he became the John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science at Cornell University. He is a member of the Basic Energy Science Advisory Committee at the DOE. He is the past director of the Cornell Center for Materials Research (2000 – 2005), an NSF funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). In 2003 he established with Prof. H. Abruña the Cornell Fuel Cell Institute, a Department of Energy (DOE) supported center. In 2007, he was appointed as director of the new Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future. In conjunction with many talented collaborators, he has published over 450 scientific articles and applied for or holds 10 patents.
