Jordan Katz ’99 – Chemistry seminar

Jordan returned to Reed yesterday, visited with students and faculty, and presented a seminar based on his doctoral research at Caltech: “Supplying Global Energy Carbon-Free:  A Combinatorial Approach to Finding Solutions”. Jordan’s hair is much shorter than we all remember, but the smile and chemistry were vintage Jordan. He told us, that according to best estimates, controlling CO2 levels in the atmosphere to any significant extent requires producing 10-20 TW (that’s terawatts) of energy worldwide from sources that won’t release greenhouse gases. The only realistic source of energy on that scale is solar energy and Jordan described his recent efforts to find metal oxide semiconductors that can split water to H2 (fuel) + O2 in a solar-powered photochemical reaction.