ME Doctoral Candidate
Wins Laird Fellowship

Erik Koepf came away from the Laird Fellowship social event thinking that he probably wasn’t going to win but that at least he had had a good time.  “I really didn’t have an agenda,” he says.  “I was just myself.”

Apparently that was good enough for the Laird Selection Committee because Koepf was chosen for the prestigious $22,000 award, which comes with no strings attached.  Established in honor of George W. Laird, the Fellowship is given annually to a graduate student in engineering “to encourage the recipient to become engaged in a broadening intellectual pursuit that may or may not be of direct application to the recipient’s chosen field of study.”

Like the 29 Laird Fellowship recipients who have preceded him, Koepf, a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering, is a well-rounded student with a variety of outside interests ranging from Ultimate Frisbee, soccer, and kayaking to music, art, and world travel.  He sky-dives, surfs, and runs marathons.

But what apparently caught the attention of the committee was Koepf’s passion for environmental awareness, education, and outreach.  He has already amassed an impressive amount of experience in this area, even though he is only 25 years old.

Koepf grew up in Half Moon Bay, California, a small coastal community south of San Francisco.  The son of a commercial fisherman, Koepf worked the nets with his father during school breaks, and the two collaborated to launch the Fishing Families Project.  “There are lots of issues and misconceptions about commercial fishermen,” Koepf says, “and our goal was to spread the word that fishermen are ‘real people’ too.”  The program included organizing field trips and developing demonstrations for school children.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in physics from Occidental College in 2004, Koepf accepted a position as a teacher at a boarding school in Japan, where he instituted a cross-cultural environmental awareness program that connected his students with their peers at schools in California and Maine.

Koepf has also worked in construction, including one project that involved the sustainable remodeling of a historic home in Maine owned by the CEO of an environmental nonprofit group with which Koepf was involved.

And, although his undergraduate degree is not in engineering, Koepf crafted an education for himself in this field by attending classes at various colleges and universities during the summer.

With all of those elements forming his personal background, it was not surprising that Koepf set his sights on a career in energy engineering.  One of the schools where he took engineering courses in his travels was the University of New South Wales in Australia, an institution where UD Professor Christiana Honsberg has strong affiliations.  All of the stars lined up right for Koepf to come to Delaware—he expressed an interest in studying sustainable energy as a graduate student and was immediately directed to UD and the Solar Hydrogen IGERT Program that Honsberg directs.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training) Program is aimed at training Ph.D. scientists and engineers with “the interdisciplinary background and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed to address the global questions of the future.”

The multidisciplinary Solar Hydrogen IGERT Program at UD was a perfect fit for Koepf, and his Ph.D. research will focus on solar thermal hydrogen generation for fuel cell applications under Profs. Ajay Prasad and Suresh Advani.

An IGERT Fellowship will support Koepf’s graduate education, but the Laird, he says, will “free him to pursue such ideas that might otherwise merely remain in the back of my mind and imagination.”

For Erik Koepf, everything he has done so far in his life is “connected through common themes of understanding, cooperation, modeling and restructuring our energy use and its interrelationship with the atmosphere and the built and natural environment.”  The Laird Fellowship will undoubtedly allow him to pursue the aspects of that theme that aren’t addressed in his classes and the research labs here at UD.

“Bridging the gap in understanding and education about sustainable, renewable energy sources and technologies and making connections—the personal, human connections necessary to truly impart a sufficient level of understanding—are almost more critical than the raw science of the matter itself,” he says.

by Diane Kukich