The  Visiting Scholar Program
and the
Departments of Biology and Physics
University at Albany
State University of New York
Present
Michael Deem
John W. Cox Professor in Bioengineering
and Professor of Physics & Astronomy
Rice University
“Impacting Climate Change:
New Materials for Carbon
Capture”
One of the main bottlenecks to deploying large-scale carbon
dioxide capture and storage (CCS) in power plants is the energy
required to separate the CO2 from flue gas. For example, near-term CCS technology applied to coal-fired power
plants is projected to reduce the net output of the plant by some 30% and to increase the cost of electricity by
60–80%. Developing capture materials and processes that reduce the parasitic energy imposed by CCS is
therefore an important area of research. I will describe a computational approach to rank adsorbents for their
performance in CCS. I will describe how a database of hundreds of thousands of predicted materials was
created and screened for the potential to reduce the parasitic energy of CCS by 30–40% compared with nearterm technologies.
Michael Deem B.S.CalTech, ‘91, Ph.D. U C Berkeley, ‘94, researches Newton’s laws of biology, the theory of
personalized critical care, physical theories of pathogen evolution, vaccine design, and the structure of zeolites.
He is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Physical
Society, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the AAAS. His honors include a Sloan Foundation
fellowship; the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 2002; a National Science Foundation CAREER
Award; the Colburn Award for excellence in publications as well as the Professional Progress Award from the
American Institute of Chemical Engineers; and the O’Donnell Award from the Academy of Medicine,
Engineering & Science of Texas. He gave the Vaughan Lectures at Caltech in 2007 and was chosen one of
MIT’s Technology Review 1999 Young Innovators. He is an associate editor of Physical Biology and Protein
Engineering Design & Selection.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
7:30 pm
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
D’Ambra Auditorium , Lifesciences Research Building