Burcu Gurkan, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, was recently named a Fellow for Scialog: Negative Emissions Science.
As part of the new, multi-year initiative, Gurkan will join more than 50 promising early-career scientists taking up the pressing challenge of greenhouse gases accumulating in earth’s atmosphere and oceans.
According to a release from the organization, Scialog is short for “science + dialog.” As part of each multi-year initiative, Fellows are selected from multiple disciplines and institutions across the U.S. and Canada to maximize creative thinking and innovative ideas. The cohort of Fellows is diverse and inclusive of researchers from underrepresented groups of scientists.
The multidisciplinary group of scientists—from chemistry, engineering, materials science, physics, and related disciplines—will explore how to advance fundamental science in the design of novel approaches for removing and utilizing or sequestering greenhouse gases, and for making those technologies globally scalable.
At each conference, participants form multidisciplinary teams to design cutting-edge research projects, which they pitch to leading scientists who have facilitated discussions throughout the meeting. A committee of these facilitators then recommends seed funding to catalyze the most promising of those team projects, based primarily on the potential for high-impact results.
Co-sponsored by Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the series will begin virtually with its first conference Nov. 5-6.