Farrington Daniels Award

Professor Pitchumani is the George R. Goodson Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech, USA. At Virginia Tech, he directs the Advanced Materials and Technologies Laboratory (amtl.me.vt.edu), which focuses on research in the areas of energy and materials. From 2011–2015, Prof Pitchumani served in an invitational role as the Chief Scientist for the SunShot Initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), where he was the Founding Director of the SunShot Concentrating Solar Power program and Director of the Solar Grid Integration program. In his role at the DOE, he defined bold national goals for achieving cost-competitive solar energy technologies and their ubiquitous integration into the electric grid.

Prof Pitchumani is the Editor-in-Chief of the ISES journal Solar Energy and serves on the editorial team of many journals. He also served as the U.S. representative on the Executive Committee of the International Energy Agency’s SolarPACES and on the Advisory Board of Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA)’s Australian Solar Thermal Research Initiative (ASTRI). Among his professional honours, he is a Life Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and a recipient of the ASME Frank Kreith Energy Award for significant contributions to a secure energy future as well as the Hoyt Clarke Hottel Award and the Charles Greeley Abbot Award from the American Solar Energy Society for leadership and pioneering contributions in the development of cost-effective solar energy. For his career accomplishments, he was recognized with the Distinguished Alumnus Award by his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

ISES is very pleased to present this prestigious award to Dr. David Renné.

Dr. Dave Renné served as President of the International Solar Energy Society from 2010 - 2019 and continues to serve on the society's Board. From 1991 until his retirement in 2012, Dr. Renné managed the solar resource assessment activities at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).  In 2012, he formed the consultancy Dave Renne Renewables. He is dedicated to the concept of urgently achieving 100% renewable energy to meet all of our end use energy requirements as the best solution to the climate crisis.

ISES is very pleased to present this prestigious award to Dr. Lawrence L. Kazmerski.

Lawrence L. Kazmerski is Emeritus Research Staff Member of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, Colorado, having last served as Executive Director Science and Technology Partnerships at NREL 2009-2013.  He is currently Research Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, with the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI). Kazmerski’s 50-year professional career in solar energy includes serving as the founding Director of the National Center for Photovoltaics (NCPV) for the period 1999 through 2008.

ISES is very pleased to present this prestigious award to Prof. Robert Pitz-Paal.

Prof. Robert Pitz-Paal is the Director of the Solar Research Institute at the DLR-German Aerospace Center. He further holds the Chair for Solar Technology in the Department of Mechanical Engineering of RWTH Aachen University in Germany. The DLR's Solar Research Institute, which he co-founded, is the largest institution in Germany in the field of concentrating solar technologies, comprising a staff of more than 150 scientists and engineers with state-of-the-art laboratories in Cologne, Stuttgart, Jülich, and Almería.

He received his PhD degree from Ruhr University of Bochum in 1993. His main research areas are the technical analysis and optimization of concentrating solar power systems for generating electricity and fuels. His scientific publications won awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and a variety of his research results were transferred to industry and led to the creation of spin-off companies. In 2008 he was a visiting Professor at ETH Zurich and from 2009 to 2010 he was Deputy Director of the DLR’s Institute of Technical Thermodynamics. As an internationally recognized expert on concentrated solar technologies, he serves as associate editor of ISES’s Solar Energy Journal and as vice-chairman of the International Energy Agency’s SolarPACES-Solar Power and Chemical Energy Systems implementing agreement.  He is member of the board of the German Industry Association of Concentrated Solar Power. 

ISES is very pleased to present this prestigious award to Prof. Richard Perez.

Prof. Perez is a Research Professor at the University at Albany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, where he directs applied research and teaches in the fields of solar radiation, and solar energy applications, and day-lighting. Two of his noted contributions to the field of solar energy are: Identifying the potential of photovoltaic power generation to meet the electrical power demand of large cities in nontraditional solar regions such as the north-eastern United States and the development solar radiation models, which have been incorporated in standard solar energy and day-lighting calculation practice around the world.

The 2013 Recipient of the Farrington Daniels Award is Prof. Aldo Steinfeld of the ETH Zurich Institute of Technology in Switzerland for his work as a leading scholar and outstanding contributions to the fundamentals of high-temperature/high-flux solar technology. He is widely recognized for his pioneering research on solar concentrating systems for clean fuels production. He has been the catalyst behind the international initiative to use concentrated solar radiation for performing high-temperature thermochemical processes. He has been at the mainstream both in terms of fundamental research and innovative applications.

Prof. Steinfeld gave the Farrington Daniels Lecture at the Solar World Congress 2013.