Additional Governing Members

Dr. Ajay Prasad is the College of Engineering Alumni Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is the founder and former Director of the Center for Fuel Cell Research which was established to facilitate coordination amongst UD faculty members working in fuel cells and the hydrogen infrastructure, and to build connections with industry. Professor Prasad also directs the University of Delaware Fuel Cell Bus Program whose goal is to develop and demonstrate fuel cell powered transit vehicles and hydrogen refueling stations. Professor Prasad’s other research interests include wind and ocean current energy, and vehicle to grid technology. He is also interested in energy-efficient, solar-powered buildings.

Dr. Dana Veron is a Professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment where she has an appointment in both the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences and the Physical Ocean Science and Engineering program in the School of Marine Science and Policy. She is a founding member of CReW. Dr. Veron’s recent research interests include offshore wind resource assessment, sea breeze circulation, land-ocean-atmospheric interactions, and regional climate change. Her research involves local-to-mesoscale atmospheric modeling along the Mid-Atlantic coastline and in the Arctic, as well as analysis of in situ observations of low-level winds and boundary layer clouds. Dr. Veron co-teaches the course on offshore wind power, as well as teaching courses on physical meteorology, and climate change.

Affiliated Members

Dr. Helen Bowers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Finance in the Lerner College of Business and Economics.  Dr. Bowers has published numerous articles on corporate finance and valuation.  As a Senior Advisor for the Woodward Group, LLC, a merchant bank and consulting firm, she has performed valuation analysis for fairness opinions, mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, restructurings and litigation support.  Dr. Bowers’ current interests include the development of financial markets and specialized financial instruments, capital formation, valuation and the structure of project finance in the renewable energy sector.    Dr. Bowers is also a member of the Visiting Faculty at the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France where she teaches Innovation in Energy Finance.

Dr. Jeffrey Buler is a Professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology. His research is focused on the movement, behavior, and ecology of birds during migratory stopover and modeling wildlife species distributions across spatial scales. Dr. Buler is also one of a handful of aeroecologists in the United States actively using the national network of weather surveillance radars to study the distribution, movement, and habitat use patterns of migratory birds and other flying animals in the airspace. His radar research includes developing techniques to quantify bird distributions, assessing bird response to habitat management and restoration activities, identifying important stopover areas, and examining how migrating birds respond to extreme weather events and negotiate ecological barriers to migration. He is also studying the flight activity of birds and bats at the University of Delaware’s wind turbine in Lewes, DE.

Dr. David L. Burris is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests are in the area of materials tribology; research activities target an improved understanding of the fundamental processes underlying friction and wear at contacting interfaces. Current research efforts are motivated by challenges of space lubrication, joint disease rehabilitation and prevention, and wind turbine drivetrain reliability.

Dr. Meryl P. Gardner is a Professor of Marketing at the Lerner College of Business and Economics. Dr. Gardner’s research interests involve viewing marketing opportunities through a consumer psychology lens, with a focus on the influence of effect on consumer behavior and the role of marketing in socially positive behavior change. She is particularly interested in consumer response to energy-efficient technologies and socially beneficial products. Her work has appeared in Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Retailing, Psychology and Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Marketing Letters, Journal of Small Business Management, Journal of Advertising and other journals.

Dr. Matthew Oliver is the Patricia and Charles Robertson Distinguished Professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy. Dr. Oliver oversees the Ocean Exploration, Remote Sensing and Biogeography Laboratory (ORB Lab) at the University of Delaware. He is also one of the inaugural members of the Robotic Discovery Laboratories, which opened in August 2014. Dr. Oliver graduated from Rutgers University with a Ph.D. in Oceanography. His primary research interests are ocean observing, ocean biogeography, polar ecosystems, coastal ecosystems, remote sensing, phytoplankton, bioluminescence, and evolution. He focuses on biological oceanography and biogeography, working to pinpoint where ocean organisms live, their populations and factors that influence their distributions.

Dr. George R. Parsons is a Professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Economics. Most of Dr. Parsons’ research centers on understanding consumers’ preferences for environmental goods. He is a specialist in choice modeling techniques including travel cost models, hedonic price models, contingent valuation, and choice experiments. He has experience in survey research, discrete-choice econometrics, applied welfare economics, and consumer demand. His most closely related work is choice models valuing the attributes of electric vehicles, the visual disamenity of offshore wind power, beach closures (including beach narrowing due to sea level rise), and shorebird recreation. His work appears in the JEEM, Resource and Energy Economics, Environmental and Resource Economics, Land Economics, and other field journals in environmental economics.

Dr. Srikanth Pilla is a Professor and the Director of the Center for Composite Materials at the University of Delaware (UD-CCM) with faculty appointments in Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He is also the Founding Director of ‘AIM for Composites’, a Department of Energy funded Energy Frontier Research Center. Pilla’s research interests are in the fundamentals and applications of sustainable and lightweight functional materials and manufacturing, including composites for wind turbine blades. Pilla has co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed archival publications. His research is supported by NSF, DOE, USDA, DOD, and NASA, besides several foundations and industries including automotive OEMs, and their suppliers.

Dr. James Rising is an Assistant Professor at the School of Marine Science & Policy. Dr. Rising studies the economics of environmental policy, with an emphasis on risks from climate change and the complexities of human-natural systems. His research includes work on Net-Zero economics, climate justice, the social cost of carbon, tipping points, climate risks for water and agriculture, and the future of coffee. Prior to joining UD, James was a researcher at the Grantham Research Institute at LSE and held postdoctoral positions at the Energy & Resources Group at UC Berkeley and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Jens Schubert is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics in the Lerner College of Business and Economics. Dr. Schubert graduated from The University of Tennessee Knoxville with a Ph.D. in Economics. Prior to graduate studies in Economics, he earned a Master of Science in Econophysics (Dipl. Phys.-Oec.) from the University of Ulm in Germany, and gained experience in the private sector, working for Accenture, Robert Bosch, and UniCredit. Dr. Schubert’s primary research interests are in the fields of environmental economics, energy economics, and industrial organization. He is also interested in questions in behavioral and financial economics. In his research, he is tying these interests to experimental economics and applied econometrics.

Dr. W. Gregory (Greg) Shriver is a Professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology where he is engaged in collaborative projects related to restoration, avian ecology, monitoring, and conservation.  He is presently working with collaborators to: 1) develop a salt marsh integrity monitoring protocol for USFWS, 2) address the long-term (30 + years) effects of forest fragmentation on a neo-tropical migratory bird reproductive success and mating systems, 3) investigate the effects of tidal marsh management practices on breeding birds, 4) determine the effects of sea level rise and tidal marsh birds on the east coast, and 5) and determine the prevalence of Campylobacter in wild birds of eastern North America.  He is currently assessing the post-construction impacts on avian and bat species at the UD Lewes Wind Turbine.  This project is focused on estimating the seasonal mortality risk.

Dr. Arthur Trembanis is Professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy. Dr. Trembanis graduated from the College of William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Studies with a Ph.D. in Marine Science. He currently directs the Coastal Sediments Hydrodynamics & Engineering Lab (CSHEL), which seeks to understand the morphodynamic processes of coastal systems. In his post-doctoral studies, he worked with the United States Geological Survey at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where he focused on the morphodynamics of complex seabed features such as Rippled Scour Depressions (RSDs) based on observational records and numerical modeling strategies. Dr. Trembanis’ primary research interests are in the observation and modeling of coastal morphodynamics, the morphological interplay of hydrodynamics (waves and currents) with sediment and seabed features (morphology).

Dr. Tyler VanBuren is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware who specializes in the study of Aerodynamics and Hydrodynamics. He develops flow control strategies to improve the performance of aerodynamic systems, e.g., a wind turbine blade. Through the use of flow control actuators, turbine blades can be made more efficient through a larger performance envelope. In addition to improving turbine performance, he is interested in how wind turbine farms impact the turbulent atmospheric boundary layer, where research could lead to improved climate modeling strategies in areas with large turbine presence.

Dr. Fabrice Veron is a Professor in the Schoool of Marine Science and Policy and Dean of the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. Dr. Veron’s research focuses on air-sea interaction and the small scale fluid dynamics at the surface of the ocean. He is particularly interested in the generation of turbulence on both sides of natural free surfaces, such as that generated by breaking surface waves and air-flow separation. He is also conducting research on the transport and evaporation of marine aerosols as well as the turbulence generated by rainfall. Dr. Veron has extensive experience in wave measurements and modeling, coupled air-sea surface wave related problems including wave turbulence modulations, and the influence of wave on air sea fluxes and wave modeling.