Organization highlight: Stanford POWER

Stanford POWER aims to introduce local high school students from historically marginalized communities to topics in sustainability and energy research. They are motivated by the goal of diversifying the pipeline of future energy leaders. Our graduate student, Diego Uruchurtu Patino, is the Director of Stanford POWER. Some of their workshops and activities are highlighted below.

POWER hosts in-school workshops at local Bay Area high schools. At these events, POWER selects a presenter (typically a graduate student from Stanford) to teach the students about energy-related research during a 45 minute interactive workshop. The workshop includes a 20 minute talk introducing the students to a certain topic related to energy research, and is followed by a hands-on activity in which the students can personally interact with a demonstration or experiment relating the taught content to a real, tangible concept. Workshop topics this year included Designing an Electric Grid, Direct Air Capture: a technology to fight climate change, and Electric Vehicles: the cars of the future.

Stanford Energy Day: This once-a-year event is hosted by POWER and involves transporting students from local high schools to Stanford’s campus for a day filled with tours, workshops, panels, and demonstrations related to energy research at Stanford. This year, the team taught the students about how batteries are made, and how 3D printing may help enable the future of batteries. The team also showed them a few demos for various instruments used in this type of research, such as SEM, XPS, and a quick tour of the Product Realization Lab. This event is usually held at the end of Spring. Participating high schools this year: Brenham High School, TIDE Academy.

If you are interested, please get in touch with Diego for opportunities to get involved!