CEI Interdisciplinary Seminar: Sarah Saslow, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
From Manhattan Project to Modern Cleanup: , The Science Behind Nuclear Waste Remediation and Immobilization
Environmental remediation and clean energy innovation are often treated as distinct challenges, yet the technologies and policies needed to advance a sustainable energy future are deeply connected to how we manage the environmental legacies of past and present energy systems. This presentation will explore how fundamental chemistry, materials science, and advanced characterization are being translated into practical solutions for complex environmental remediation challenges. Examples will include cementitious waste forms designed to immobilize long-lived radionuclides, mixed ion-exchange resin systems developed to treat co-mingled groundwater contaminants, and fixative coatings used to limit contaminant mobility during facility deactivation and decommissioning. Across these applications advanced solid-phase characterization methods, such as X-ray spectroscopy and computed tomography, are used to…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Nanoengineering & Sciences Building (NAN). Campus room: NAN 181. Accessibility Contact: Danica Hendrickson, danicah@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, October 22, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
CEI Interdisciplinary Seminar: Erin Baker, University of Massachusetts
Shared Energy Storage for Financial Benefits and Inclusive Participation in the Energy Transition
Battery energy storage systems can lower household energy costs and strengthen resilience, but affordability and access remain major barriers, especially for households with limited capital. Shared residential storage offers a pathway to expand access by enabling households to co-invest in and co-operate a battery. We develop a generalizable framework to quantify the economic value of sharing (VoS) – the surplus created when households coordinate storage investment and operation relative to acting alone. Using 8,760-hour demand data from 36 Census Block Groups in Holyoke, Massachusetts, we solve over 50,000 storage optimization problems across three time-of-use (TOU) tariffs and a wide range of battery prices. We find that sharing generates substantial surplus, up to $125 per household for pairs at a battery cost of $150/kWh under a typical TOU, and up to $400 per household for coalitions-of-ten under…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Nanoengineering & Sciences Building (NAN). Campus room: NAN 181. Accessibility Contact: Danica Hendrickson, danicah@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, October 29, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
CEI Interdisciplinary Seminar: Weiwei Yang, Microsoft
GridSFM: A Foundation Model for the Power Grid
AI has a power grid problem. The power grid has a compute problem. Data centers are arriving faster than transmission lines can be built. The fastest new capacity is whatever the existing grid can already carry, but finding it is the hard part. It is nonlinear, nonconvex, and mixed-integer all at once: AC optimal power flow with siting and switching on top. Each solve is slow, and the search is combinatorial. We introduce GridSFM, the first foundation model for the power grid, to break this compute bottleneck. This talk follows the full path, from curating publicly available data into realistic grid topologies to designing a model whose architecture encodes the physics of power flow. Then we put it to work: siting data centers where the grid has headroom, and optimizing topology to relieve the congestion they create.
About the Speaker
Weiwei Yang is the co-founder of Asemic.ai, where she builds foundation models for engineered systems to power civilization,…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Nanoengineering & Sciences Building (NAN). Campus room: NAN 181. Accessibility Contact: Danica Hendrickson, danicah@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, November 12, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM.