Ahsan Choudhuri

When three of the doctoral students from our Energy Science and Engineering PhD track graduated this semester, it wasn’t just business as usual. Aside from the graduates receiving job offers in the energy industry way before their dissertation defenses, these graduates have something special that makes all the difference—they were trained very differently than the way most doctoral programs train their students.   When we first started our Energy Science and Engineering program, we did not just want to create a PhD program to graduate future professors only. Rather, we wanted to train a generation of doctoral engineers who will understand that the research is not only the production of knowledge but also the transformation of knowledge into valuable commodities, commodities that will retain the United States’ supremacy in energy technology businesses and create jobs to support our quality of life. We wanted them to understand that the transition from knowledge to commodities requ