People

David Croll Chair, Sustainable Energy Systems
Associate Director, Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future

Dr. Tester is the David Croll Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. He is also the Director of the Energy Initiative in the College of Engineering and Associate Director of the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future, with special responsibility for the energy focus of CCSF.

For more than three decades, he has been involved in chemical engineering process research as it relates to renewable and conventional energy extraction and conversion and environmental control technologies. He is an expert in geothermal energy and supercritical fluids for green chemical synthesis. Until 2008, Tester was the H.P. Meissner Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT (1980-2008), Director of MIT's Energy Laboratory (1989-2001), Director of MIT's School of Chemical Engineering Practice (1980-1989) and a group leader in the Geothermal Engineering Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (1974-1980). 

He is currently a member of the advisory boards of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (chair), the Midwest Research Institute, the American Council of Renewable Energy, Idaho National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has served as a member of the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust (chair) and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. He was a member of the 1997 Energy R&D Panel of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), and has served as an advisor to the USDOE and the National Research Council in areas related to concentrating solar power, geothermal and biomass energy, and other renewable technologies and waste minimization and pollution reduction.

 

Tester is the author of two textbooks, Sustainable Energy: Choosing Among Options [Authors: J.W. Tester, E.M. Drake, M.J. Driscoll, M.W. Golay, W.A. Peters (2006). ISBN 0-262-20153-4] and Thermodynamics and Its Applications, 3rd Edition [J. W. Tester and M. Modell (1997). 0-139-15356-X]