Abstract: 

What is this talk about: We find ourselves at a pivotal point in history for the long-term sustainability of our society and biome. It would be so easy to have a negative view about the future i.e. climate change is slowly baking us all to death. Last year alone was pretty intense - 1/3 of pakistan was flooded last year and arctic storms ravaged the US. Our climate is becoming more extreme and unpredictable. In 2 years time, we'll be closer to 2050 than the year 2000. We have no time to lose.

But this talk isn't about doomerism or trying to induce anxiety in you. It's about demonstrating how you, as a university graduate, highly trained in some technical field, can exert maximum leverage in the fight against climate change through the career choices that you make over the next 10, 20 or 30 years. In this talk, I will highlight the exciting, state-of-the-art work ongoing around the planet in areas such as Green Hydrogen, The future of food, Carbon Dioxide Removal, Fusion, Fission, and Renewables - technologies all key to our sustainable future.

All with the goal of simply providing you with some inspiration and helping you to imagine how your skill sets might one day lend themselves to our collective goal of a sustainable world. Climate change is daunting - but it also represents a massive opportunity to make the world better.

Speaker:

Dr Nicholas Chadwick received his MChem in organometallic chemistry from the University of Nottingham in 2012 before successfully studying for a PhD in materials science at University College London in 2015. After graduating he worked on the development of a range of early stage hardware technologies such as advanced transistor technologies, low-cost pollutant sensors for under-represented groups across Southern Asia and Mexico, and carbon capture technologies. He became convinced that direct air carbon capture (DAC) was the one thing we needed at scale to reach our net zero targets of 2050 and didn't have. After going on a bit of a journey scoping out opportunities he decided to co-found Mission Zero Technologies to commercialize and scale Direct Air Capture.