Two faculty members from the University of Notre Dame’s College of Engineering are among the 74 early-career researchers selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering program.
Alexander Dowling, Tony and Sarah Earley Collegiate Professor of Energy and the Environment and associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and Emily Grubert, associate professor of sustainable energy policy in the Keough School of Global Affairs and concurrent associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences will represent Notre Dame at the event.
The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering symposia bring together emerging engineering leaders from industry, academia, and government labs to discuss pioneering technical work and leading-edge research.
“Professors Dowling and Grubert are outstanding early-career engineers, and we are delighted that they are being recognized by the Academy,” said Patricia J. Culligan, the Matthew H. McCloskey Dean of the College of Engineering. “The interdisciplinary nature of their research agendas makes them perfectly suited for this opportunity. I expect their experiences at the symposia to spark important cross-disciplinary collaborations and enrich entirely different fields with the transfer of techniques and methodologies.”
Dowling’s research integrates chemical engineering, computational optimization, and machine learning to develop advanced models and decision-support tools that bridge the gap between lab-bench and industrial-scale production. With work spanning energy systems, carbon capture, sustainable hydrogen, critical materials, and advanced separation technologies, his focus is integrated energy systems and separation systems modeling, including work that couples economic electric grid models with the dynamic operation of industrial systems. His research group contributes to several open-source software projects for mathematical modeling, optimization, uncertainty quantification, and experiment design for complex systems.
Dowling, who joined Notre Dame’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in 2017, earned his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University.
Grubert is a civil engineer and environmental sociologist who studies how we can make better decisions about large infrastructure systems, particularly related to justice-centering decarbonization of the U.S. energy system. Her specific area of focus is the socioenvironmental impacts of energy policy and infrastructure, and how community and societal priorities can be better incorporated into policy and project decisions. Her major methods include scenario analysis, life cycle assessment, survey and interview research and text mining.
Grubert, who joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2022, holds a Ph.D. in environment and resources from Stanford University. From 2021-2022, she served as the deputy assistant secretary for carbon management at the U.S. Department of Energy. In addition to her appointments in the College of Engineering, she is a core faculty affiliate of the Keough School’s Pulte Institute for Global Development.
Together with their fellow engineers also selected for the symposia, Dowling and Grubert will explore four topics: innovation in bioengineered materials, computing challenges for artificial intelligence, agriculture as a system-of-systems, and hypersonics.
The 2026 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium will be held September 21-24 at the University of Texas at Austin.
—Mary Hendriksen, Notre Dame Engineering