strong>Paulo Soares
Paulo Soares is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State, with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), in Brazil. Since undergraduate school, Paulo’s been researching renewable energy generation, focusing on wind power generation and solar power. Paulo decided that solar power, due mainly to the possibility of regular people generating their own electricity, would be the main focus of research. Such decision brought him to join Dr. Jeffrey Brownson’s Solar Ecology Collaborative group (a cohort of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff committed to bringing innovative approaches in terms of solar design and solar technologies, using disruptive technologies such as 3D printing and blockchain). Much of Paulo’s recent work is related to “The Solar Genome Project”, which is focused on generating and open sharing of knowledge about the solar resource (sunlight, or solar irradiance), solar photovoltaic systems, and technologies related to monitoring those systems and the light resource, distributed among the largest possible group of people in Penn State operations, education, and research, across multiple campuses. Paulo, through research, hopes to help to build a stronger solar culture in our society. “The more people adopt solar technologies, the more sustainable our future tends to be.”