**Fitzpatrick Distinguished Lecture** High Impact Alternative Energy R&D at a University

This presentation is about game changing alternative energy R&D at a university. This is not an easy career path, because if you have a great idea that will likely be a game changer, but not on some agency’s roadmap, you most likely won’t get funded. This is why most tenure track and mid-career professors chose to chase the money instead. This situation is particularly onerous for those working in the alternative energy fields such as photovoltaics (PVs), energy storage, and energy conversion. And because agencies fund “roadmaps” rather than fund track record and great practical ideas that could lead to “products” and not just mostly unread Ph.D theses, the US will not be among those nations who reap the economic benefits of the alternative energy industries.

In spite of this situation I have chosen to work on high impact alternative energy projects. My presentation will cover the highlights of my self-defined alternative energy programs, which, if successful, will lead to new alternative energy products. These include a solar power conversion project and a project that uses bulk aluminum rich alloys for large scale and safe energy storage, which splits water to make hydrogen on-demand.  My presentation will include a discussion of why, in my opinion, the government funding agencies are not supporting the academic community in performing high risk but high impact R&D so desperately needed by the US technology based economy. 

Jerry M. Woodall is Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a National Medal of Technology Laureate. Jerry spent most of the early and mid parts of his career at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he rose to the rank of IBM Fellow. He invented and patented many important commercial high-speed electronic and photonic devices which depend on the heterojunction, including bright-red LEDs, ultra-fast transistors, high efficiency solar cells, and pseudomorphic high-electron-mobility transistor (pHEMT).

Jerry was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1989 and is a Fellow of the APS, IEEE, ECS, and AVS. He has published 366 publications in the open literature and been issued 77 U.S. patents. He has received hundreds of awards from various organizations. He is a co-founder of LightSpin Technologies Inc., a high performance photo detector company, and Compound Photonics, http://www.compoundphotonics.com, a high performance optical projector company.

Jerry earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and a BS in Metallurgy from MIT. His research is currently focused on three areas: 1) energy storage, transport, and hydrogen production; 2) very-high-efficiency photovoltaic devices; and 3) ultra-fast transistor materials and devices. He considers his areas of expertise to be exploratory compound semiconductor materials and devices and water-splitting metal alloys.