Seven faculty members affiliated with the Texas Materials Institute and from across the Cockrell School of Engineering have been awarded grants from the 2026 Strategic Energy Seed Grant Program, part of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austsin.
All 19 projectcs awarded comprise "an exciting set of forward-looking projects shaping the future of energy abundance and security." Picked from a pool of 79 proposals, the multidisciplinary teams come from across campus. Brian Korgel, director of the UT Energy Institute and Rashid Engineering Regents Chair Professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, pointed out that “Global energy demand is high, pushed by electrification, data centers, and economic growth. At the same time, the need to ensure that the energy ecosystem at home and abroad is secure has never been more urgent...The University of Texas at Austin is built for this, leveraging its sheer scale, deep expertise, and tight relationships with industry that turn lab breakthroughs into real-world solutions."
The program is funded through the support of the Energy Institute's industry partners and is "is designed to advance interdisciplinary, cutting-edge research at The University of Texas at Austin "while graduate students and postdoctoral researchers working on high-impact energy challenges."
TMI-affiliated faculty as Lead PIs on their projects include:
- Thomas Underwood, Lead PI, Plasma-Assisted Catalysis for Nonoxidative Methan Conversion Into Hydrogen and Carbon Nanotubes
- Laxminarayan Raja, Lead PI, Digital Twin for Commercial Water Electrolyzers: An Automated Intelligent Platform for the Scale-Up of Green Hydrogen
- Vaibhav Bahadur, Lead PI, Scaling and Corrosion-Free Distillation To Enable Saline Water Use for Data Centers
- Yuanyue Liu, Lead PI, Improving Catalyst Durability for CO2 Conversion by Electrolyte Engineering
- Wen Song, Lead PI, Downhole Lithium Sensing and In Situ Extraction From Oilfield Brines
TMI-affiliated faculty as secondary PIs on the projects include:
- Manish Kumar, Reducing Water Stress in Texas: Membrane-Based Atmospheric Water Capture
- Vaibhav Bahadur, The Water-Energy Nexus: Assess and Evaluate Sustainable Industrial Water Sourcing via Brackish Water Resources – the Dockum Aquifer, West Texas
- C. Buddie Mullins, Plasma-Assisted Catalysis for Nonoxidative Methane Conversion into Hydrogen and Carbon Nanotubes
To see all the awardees and projects, visit the Energy Institute's website.
