Rohini traveled to the University of Minnesota (UMN) to attend Prof. Jane Davidson's retirement seminar. Felt somewhat unreal to be there but it was also great to be back with grad school friends and colleagues. And, it always feels like a homecoming to go back to UMN ME department.

Thank you Jane for being a fearless leader of the Solar Lab and for championing and supporting so many of us to till this day. To 30 Years of Solar Lab's successes and many more in the making! 

We are kicking off this semester with another lab BBQ at Hunt Park - lots of food, laughs, and Rachel's "Charty Party" is still in fashion. 

Many thanks to Prof. Srinivas Reddy for inviting and organizing a seminar visit at IIT-Madras, Mechanical Engineering. Was so happy to meet and chat with so many spirited students and postdocs. Especially enjoyed visiting Dr. Reddy's impressive lab facilities focusing on concentrating solar power research and chatting with Dr. Goyal and his research group.

Rohini gave an invited talk titled "Thermal Transport and Chemical Phenomena in Solar Reactors: Enabling Sun to Heat, Fuels and Nutrients" at the Department of Chemical Engineering in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Had a great experience interacting with many faculty and students in the Chemical and Mechanical Engineering Departments -- impressive facilities and lots of interesting research directions. 

Many congratulations to Aditya Sundar, who is co-advised by Liang (Materials Science & Engineering) and Rohini (Mechanical Engineering), for successfully defending his thesis presentation titled "Modeling the structural and chemical stability of materials in reactive environments using multiscale methods". 

Aditya has spearheaded a new field of work in TREE Lab focusing on assessing corrosion effects in metal alloy in supercritical CO2 environments at high temperatures up to 1000 C. Thank you for being hard working, diligent and persistent. Good luck to him on his future endeavors as a postdoctoral scholar at Argonne National Laboratory. 

A fond farewell to Theo Rulko, undergraduate student extraordinaire. Theo was instrumental in designing, prototyping and testing a gravity-driven hopper and channel flow chamber in our lab to test the effectiveness of new instrumentation ideas to characterize solid volume fractions in the flow. 

Thanks Theo for being energetic, creative and rigorous in all that you did in our lab. Best wishes for graduate school at MIT! 

Our group had 3 talks including an invited talk by Luisa Barrera (yay!) at the 241st ECS Meeting at Vancouver. Luisa, was our sole in-person attendee for the conference. 

1. Modeling the Effects of Coatings, Light Absorption, and Mass Transfer on Solar-to-Hydrogen Efficiencies in Z-Scheme Photocatalytic Reactors
2. (Invited Talk) Experimental Quantification of the Effects of Concentration and pH on Nitrate-to-Ammonia Reaction Selectivity for Copper Electrodes
3. ​Effects of Thermal Convection on Species Transport in Photocatalytic Suspension Reactors

Rohini was invited as a panelist on the topic of "From Particles to Panels" at the 11th US/German Solar Fuels Workshop along with Dr. Fatwa Abdi and Dr. Peter Agobo. Was great to be part of this engaging panel discussion, and thanks for the invite Prof. Daniel Esposito and Dr. Verena Streibal. Lots of room and need for fundamental science and applied innovations towards photocatalytic fuels production.