Nobel Sustainability Lecture & Networking

Dr. Arun Majumdar is the inaugural Dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He is the Jay Precourt Provostial Chair Professor at Stanford University, a faculty member of the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Energy Science and Engineering, a Senior Fellow and former Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy and Senior Fellow (courtesy) of the Hoover Institution. He is also a faculty in Department of Photon Science at SLAC.

In October 2009, Dr. Majumdar was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate to become the Founding Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), where he served until June 2012 and helped ARPA-E become a model of excellence and innovation for the government with bipartisan support from Congress and other stakeholders. Between March 2011 and June 2012, he also served as the Acting Under Secretary of Energy, enabling the portfolio of Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Office of Electricity Delivery and Reliability, Office of Nuclear Energy and the Office of Fossil Energy, as well as multiple cross-cutting efforts such as Sunshot, Grid Modernization Team and others that he had initiated. Furthermore, he was a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu, on a variety of matters related to management, personnel, budget, and policy. In 2010, he served on Secretary Chu’s Science Team to help stop the leak of the Deep Water Horizon (BP) oil spill.

Dr. Majumdar serves as the Chair of the Advisory Board of the US Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm. He led the Agency Review Team for the Department of Energy, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Biden-Harris Presidential transition. He served as the Vice Chairman of the Advisory Board of US Secretary of Energy, Dr. Ernest Moniz, and was also a Science Envoy for the US Department of State with focus on energy and technology innovation in the Baltics and Poland. He also serves on numerous advisory boards and boards of businesses, investment groups and non-profit organizations.

After leaving Washington, DC and before joining Stanford, Dr. Majumdar was the Vice President for Energy at Google, where he assembled a team to create technologies and businesses at the intersection of data, computing and electricity grid.

Dr. Majumdar is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research in the past has involved the science and engineering of nanoscale materials and devices, especially in the areas of energy conversion, transport and storage as well as biomolecular analysis. His current research focuses on redox reactions and systems that are fundamental to a sustainable energy future, multidimensional nanoscale imaging and microscopy, and an effort to leverage modern AI techniques to develop and deliver energy and climate solutions.

Prior to joining the Department of Energy, Dr. Majumdar was the Almy & Agnes Maynard Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering at University of California–Berkeley and the Associate Laboratory Director for energy and environment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He also spent the early part of his academic career at Arizona State University and University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dr. Majumdar received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1985 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989.

Peter has a degree of Master of Science in Material Science and Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

He has an extensive track record of positioning companies for successful market share growth in various international industrial markets, such as the global HVAC industry.

Peter has extensive experience with several CEOs roles in different industries and executive positions in sales and marketing, R&D and manufacturing at global companies such as Alfa Laval and SWEP International.

He has significant expertise in successfully navigating long sales cycles for industrial component for various global industry sectors and implemented heat transfer products with an exponential growth resulting in world-wide and dominating market shares.

Peter Nobel has also co-founded and run start-ups companies in the clean-tech sector to develop and market a compact and efficient heat cell for applications in the heating industry and developed new methods in water purification technology. He holds patents as well as international pending patent applications for water purification technology and listed patents in heat exchanger technology.

Peter works actively as advisory consultant to company boards in e.g. Japan and Hong Kong.

Myron Scholes is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He won Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and is co-originator of the Black-Scholes options pricing model. Scholes was awarded the Prize in 1997 for his new method of determining the value of derivatives. Scholes is currently the Chairman of the Board of Economic Advisers of Stamos Partners. Previously he served as the Chairman of Platinum Grove Asset Management and on the Dimensional Fund Advisors Board of Directors, American Century Mutual Fund Board of Directors and the Cutwater Advisory Board. He was a principal and Limited Partner at Long-Term Capital Management, L.P. and a Managing Director at Salomon Brothers. Other positions Scholes held include the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Director of the Center for Research in Security Prices, and Professor of Finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Scholes earned his PhD at the University of Chicago.

The tails of the distribution, not the middle, of the distribution of possible outcomes should be the most important concern about sustainability.   With uncertainty, tails have a compounding effect, with increasing costs of reversibility of bad climate outcomes having the most pernicious effect on global warming and society. AI applications must worry about the exceptions, not the middle of the distribution of outcomes.  Currently, concentrating on using more and more historical data creates a false sense that the average is important.  Obviously it is hard to discern the tails, the exceptions ahead from data mining history.   Carbon offsets and new technologies (such as robotics and AI) need to work together to move us forward to a sustainable future.