Jeff Tester ’66, M.S. ’67, the David Croll Sesquicentennial Fellow and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell, presented the Smith School’s annual Raymond G. Thorpe Lecture, which honors Thorpe’s dedication to excellence over 39 years of teaching.
In Tester’s seminar, “From Ice to Fire – Using Chemical Engineering Science to Explore Sustainable Water, Energy, And Food Applications,” he spoke about how many of the environmental, social, and economic challenges we face today are connected to how we provide food, energy and water. According to Tester, to ensure a sustainable future, cleaner, lower carbon intensity methods of providing food, energy and water must be accessible, affordable, and deployable at scale. While well-intended, often the solutions that are currently being implemented fall short of meeting these goals. They frequently have unintended environmental or health consequences because they are not sufficiently integrated into a system using a full life cycle approach.
The presentation highlighted Tester’s personal journey from Cornell to MIT to Los Alamos and back to Cornell to explore more sustainable approaches for treating toxic chemical wastes, to produce scalable, carbon-neutral energy from geothermal resources and from food and agricultural wastes.
Tester’s experimental and theoretical research projects have dealt with transformative processes in aqueous media over a wide range of temperature, pressure, and density conditions from near water’s ice point to its supercritical region at temperatures greater than 500°C. All of this work has relied heavily on connecting fundamentals in thermodynamics, reaction chemistry, and transport, beginning with his introduction to chemical engineering by Thorpe when Tester was an undergraduate at Cornell.
The Raymond G. Thorpe seminar series was established in 1989 by Thorpe’s many friends and alumni. The objective of the lecture is to enhance the undergraduate teaching program by inviting an alumnus who typifies exceptional professional progress and service to the Cornell community.