MIT Team Wins Clean Energy Prize for Solving Solar’s Shade Problem
An MIT team, including MBA students from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, whose integrated chip restores lost power to partially shaded solar panels — achieving double the energy capture improvement of similar technologies — won top honors at the seventh annual MIT Clean Energy Prize (CEP) competition.
Equipped with a promising business plan and a snappy catchphrase — “shade happens” — Unified Solar took home both CEP grand prizes: the DOE Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Clean Energy Prize, worth $100,000, and the NSTAR MIT Clean Energy Prize, worth $125,000.
Solar panels on residential rooftops that are partially shaded by clouds or trees sacrifice as much as 30 percent of their energy potential over a year. Unified Solar’s technology, for the first time, integrates an entire power balance circuit onto a low-cost chip that can be integrated into a solar panel to regain that lost energy. Continue reading…
MIT Sloan School of Management to Hold Conference on Long-Term Unemployment
Although the short-term unemployment rate in the U.S. is receding to pre-recession levels, long-term unemployment remains at levels unseen since the Great Depression. Nearly 4 million people have now been out of a job for more than six months. To address this crisis, its underlying causes and potential solutions, MIT Sloan School of Management’s Institute for Work and Employment Research is holding a conference on May 6 for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners.
“This will be the first national gathering of its kind to bring together these groups of experts to discuss long-term unemployment,” says MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. Ofer Sharone. “There are millions of people left out of the workforce who want to contribute. This is devastating families because of the loss of income, it’s emotionally devastating individuals, and it’s hurting our economy. We need to find solutions that work and solve this problem.”
The conference stems from a project by Sharone at the Institute for Career Transitions in which he is connecting long-term unemployed individuals with volunteer career coaches. Tracking their outcomes, he’s hoping to determine which strategies work. In addition to discussing early results from this project, the conference will bring together representatives from the most promising programs across the U.S. that support the long-term unemployed, along with policymakers and thought leaders on this issue.
The conference will be held from 9:00am – 3:30pm at MIT’s Morss Hall in the Walker Memorial Building. Members of the media are invited to attend, but pre-registration is requested. To register, please contact Michelle Rosin at mrosin03@gmail.com.
MIT Announces Recipients of the 2014 Jamieson Teaching Awards
MIT has announced that The 2014 MIT Sloan recipients of the Jamieson Teaching Awards are Professor Georgia Perakis and Associate Professor Juanjuan Zhang. The Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching Award, the most prestigious teaching prize offered by the School, was established in 2006 and is awarded each year to two MIT Sloan faculty members, as well as two electrical engineering and computer science faculty members, for their contributions to educational excellence at MIT.
Perakis, the William F. Pounds Professor of Management, a professor of operations research and operations management, and the MIT Sloan faculty co-director of the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program, was cited for her “dedication, passion, and innovative thinking that have had a long-standing impact on the School.”
Perakis, who has been a member of the faculty since 1998, said she’s passionate about her job because of the students that she teaches and mentors. “The students here are amazing, and they shape who I am. I feel like a constant student because I am always learning from them,” she said.
Zhang is an associate professor who teaches marketing management and studies social interactions and marketing strategies. The Jamieson Prize Selection Committee noted her “dedication to knowledge dissemination and pedagogical innovation, with impact extending across the Institute.”
Zhang said she was “deeply thankful” for the award. “MIT Sloan has been really supportive of my teaching over the years,” she said. “My colleagues have gone out of their way to help, and my students have brought so much enthusiasm into the classroom, which makes teaching an inspiring experience to me.”
