 The Tomcat Center was established in 2009 and its mission is to make human electricity and transportation systems more sustainable. We are very active in research, education, outreach and innovation transfer. Climate change is really the defining challenge of our era. One of the reasons I think the Tomcat program is so exciting is that it puts the focus right where it needs to be on the details of the implementation in order to make proven technologies really work. The Tomcat Center has a seed-grant research program which is intended to help promote high-risk hybrid board research that is very early stage. So the idea is that we could give seed grants to faculty and their groups to carry out important research in the area of sustainable energy with the hope that if they get some initial results and successes then they can go out and raise additional external funding for that. In total we've given out about four and a half million dollars in funding to many different researchers across this campus. In the work that I do we're largely focused on improving the efficiency of solar cells whether they're photovoltaic cells or photo electrochemical cells and it was really fantastic that Tomcat was willing to invest in a slightly longer term more fundamental project. Really lay the path for pretty exciting research in the years to come. My research focuses on figuring out how can I exploit the way we coordinate demand and supply to reduce the cost of adding more renewables. What was great about the Tomcat opportunity was the chance to really work on solutions and solutions that work for real people, real technologies, real ecosystems. One of our goals at the Tomcat Center is to educate and train the next generation of leaders in sustainable energy and so we take the educational component of what we do very seriously. Another program that we launched about a year ago is our summer internship program. Through this we allow a number of undergraduates here at Stanford the opportunity to work in startup companies in the area of sustainable energy so we provide them with a stipend and really an unparalleled experience. This past summer I interned for Flamestower and it was a company of three people. I was the fourth intern. This was through the Tomcat Center sustainability internship program which gave me a stipend and connected with other students who are doing similar things and also was just a great support network for me doing my first full-time internship which was kind of a big step. The Tomcat Center promotes sustainable energy outreach by hosting events and supporting publications. It's been my thesis for a long time that Stanford for a variety of reasons including technical and policy oriented and the broad range of what we do is uniquely positioned to take a leadership role on this. The Tomcat Center launched our innovation transfer program about a year and a half ago. This was motivated by a desire to really have our work have the biggest impact it could. We also wanted to help get these wonderful inventions and discoveries out of the laboratory and in use in the energy systems globally. Tomcat funding was really important to us because we had developed an idea at the bench scale that looked very promising but this idea is only a few gallons per day of water being treated. The Tomcat Center funding allowed us to move to a Delta Diablo in the North Bay and build a pilot facility and test it there and that was critical for proof of concept at a believable scale. Well the Tomcat funding really came at a critical time for us that allowed us to you know hire more people get the necessary equipment reliability chambers etc. I think the number one thing we got from Tomcat was early validation before we received any grant funding from the federal government before we received any venture capital funding all which we have now Tomcat was the first organization to say there's something here and we want to support it and not only was it funding it was constant connections to opportunities potential customers potential employees potential partners. For too long we have equated energy with the consumption of natural resources apart from being cheap and clean data is different from all other resources it is the only resource which is growing. If we're successful in our mission we can dramatically reduce the soft cost of a solar PV installation. If we can allow our solar installers to go all the way from performing a preliminary side assessment to generating a permit set in one streamlined application then the possibilities are huge in terms of making solar installations competitive with conventional energy sources. What we can do together is much bigger than what we've done so far and that's really something I care a lot about and hope will happen.