The Stanford Energy Seminar has been a mainstay of energy engagement at Stanford for nearly 20 years and is one of the flagship programs of the Precourt Institute for Energy. We aim to bring a wide variety of perspectives to the Stanford community – academics, entrepreneurs, utilities, non-profits, and more. 

About the talk

Water scarcity, rising energy demand, and global emissions are major sustainability challenges of the 21st century. This talk will highlight three soft matter-enabled technologies that the Diaz-Marin lab is developing to tackle these challenges. First, he will present their multiscale design of hydrogel-salt composites to produce water from air in any geography and at costs comparable to those of tap water. Secondly, he will show how low temperature carbon capture sorbents could transform AI into carbon-negative and water-positive by enabling data center heat reuse for carbon removal. Thirdly, he will discuss how dry biomass combustion could serve as a high temperature heat source to decarbonize highly challenging industries, motiving our work on molecular biopolymer-water interactions. These examples show how novel technologies enabled by fundamental studies of soft materials could mitigate pressing water, energy, and emissions challenges.

Carlos Diaz-Marin is an Assistant Professor, Energy Science & Engineering in the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University. He leads the Diaz Energy Lab on Theory and Advanced materials (DELTA) Group, which studies and leverages soft matter for applications in energy, water, and sustainability. The group integrates fundamental studies of material-molecule/ion interactions, synthesis, characterization, modeling, and device demonstration, while guided by technoeconomic analyses, for applications such as water production from air, carbon capture, building energy efficiency, biomass utilization, critical mineral recovery, and electrochemistry. Before coming to Stanford, Carlos was an ARPA-E ORISE Fellow at the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) within the US Department of Energy, helping develop research funding programs in high-risk, high-reward energy and sustainability technologies. Carlos obtained his MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering at MIT and double undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Physics from the University of Costa Rica.

Anyone with an interest in energy is welcome to join! You can enjoy seminars in the following ways:

• Attend live. The auditorium may change quarter by quarter, so check each seminar event to confirm the location. Explore the current quarter's schedule.
• Watch live in a browser livestream if available. Check each seminar event for its unique livestream URL.
• Watch recordings of past seminars 
  • Available on the Past Energy Seminars page and the Energy Seminars playlist of the Stanford Energy YouTube channel
• (For students) Take the seminar as a 1-unit class (CEE 301/ENERGY 301/MS&E 494)

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