UC Berkeley/
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The majority of my time at Berkeley has been spent working on clean hydrogen production by methane pyrolysis. I’ve modeled, designed, and built a reactor in an effort to gain insight into the issue of carbon deposition with the goal of producing hydrogen to reduce the impacts of climate change. I’m also working on high-temperature thermal energy storage materials.
University of Iowa/
Universidade Federal de Itajubá
My main research work at Iowa was in biomass energy, where we worked to optimize the gasification process through modeling and experimental analysis. I dove further into this research in Brazil where I worked with our partner laboratory to research the production of clean energy by the gasification of trash.
University of Iowa/
Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research
Part of my time at Iowa was spent working on flood prediction and prevention research. As somebody who witnessed the Cedar Rapids Flood of 2008 firsthand, this work was especially personal. We used drones and a helicopter mounted with LIDAR to develop a 3D map of the Iowa landscape. The goal of this map was to greatly improve the local precision of flood inundation maps at a scale that hadn’t been previously achieved.
Nate Weger 