Irving Institute Announces 2024 New Energy Summer Summit Cohort

What happens when you get early-career engineers, anthropologists, educators, economists, policy experts, and other energy-and-climate scholars together in the same room to work on challenges related to clean energy transitions and climate change? For the past two summers, the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society has been hosting the New Energy Summer Summit in order to find out.  

The Summer Summit, now in its third year, invites advanced graduate students, postdocs, and assistant professors from across the globe to the Dartmouth campus for three days of interdisciplinary sharing, networking, professional development, and collaboration, with the goal of breaking down disciplinary silos to catalyze new ideas. 

Feedback from participants in the Summer Summit's first two years has been resoundingly positive, with many noting the uniqueness of the opportunity to connect with peers in the same stage of their professional journey.

"The summit is a one-of-a-kind event and collaboration/ incubator for energy-related projects across disciplines," said one summit alum about the experience, "and I find that to be very useful. This is particularly important as it shows the multidimensionality of the energy challenge but also allows us as researchers to embrace new ways of approaching the problem."

This year's cohort of 20 scholars, chosen from an applicant pool of over 100, hail from 18 universities from inside and outside the US. "We were delighted to have so many extremely talented applicants this year," said Dr. Megan Litwhiler, Irving Institute Manager of Academic Initiatives. "While it was incredibly challenging to select 20 individuals from such an impressive  group of early-career scholars, we're thrilled by the diversity of expertise and perspectives among our 2024 cohort and their motivation to learn from and collaborate across disciplines to advance just energy transitions." 

The 2024 New Energy Summer Summit scholars are working on a broad set of topics, from exploring the cultural dimensions of climate and energy politics to developing structured liquid electrolytes for grid-scale, reliable energy storage to understanding the sociocultural factors influencing the adoption of clean cooking fuels in Rwanda and beyond. 

"We are really looking forward to having this group on campus to connect with each other and the Dartmouth community and excited to see what kind of 'new energy' is sparked by the convening," said Dr. Litwhiler. 

You can learn more about the 2024 Summer Summit cohort here, and view a video featuring our 2023 "Summiteers" here.