Event Details
When:
Tue, May 27, 2025, 4pm - 4:50pm
Location:
Online: Zoom
In-Person at WWU
Science Lecture, Room 150
Price:
Free
Brought to you by:
Institute for Energy Studies, The Foundation for WWU & Alumni
Description
Check out this video to watch the Watts the Impact?
Addressing climate change demands not just rapid deployment of renewables like photovoltaics and energy storage, but also intentional design to avoid unintended environmental and social harms. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a vital systems-based tool that quantifies the impacts of materials and technologies—from raw extraction to disposal or reuse.
LCA helps advance low-carbon solutions, circular strategies, and equity by identifying environmental hot spots and trade-offs. Yet it’s often applied too late in the design process, limiting its potential and risking “technology lock-in” from early, unchecked decisions.
This talk introduces life cycle thinking in the context of sustainability, systems thinking, and energy justice. We’ll cover how to interpret LCA results, including spotting red flags and greenwashing, and walk through a solar technology case study showing how methods and processing choices shape outcomes.
Finally, we’ll explore how to embed LCA earlier in design and how we, as a community, can integrate life cycle thinking into our work and daily decisions.
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Featuring:
Rachel Woods-Robinson (she/her) is a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington’s Clean Energy Institute (CEI), with a joint appointment at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Her research focuses on the environmental and human impacts of emerging technologies to address the climate crisis, including solar photovoltaics and material recovery and recycling. Her interdisciplinary work spans from nanoscale materials discovery to Terawatt-scale strategies for scaling PV toward 2050 net-zero goals.
Rachel earned a BS in Physics from UCLA and a PhD from UC Berkeley as a NSF GRFP and Chancellor’s Fellow, receiving the Ross N. Tucker award for her research on solar cell electrodes using computational chemistry, thin film synthesis, and device fabrication.
She is also passionate about science communication and community engagement. She co-founded Cycle for Science, a program where scientists bike to schools to teach sustainable materials lessons, and she teaches Cycle the Rockies with the Wild Rockies Field Institute, leading undergraduates on a month-long climate and energy-focused bike course across Montana.
Questions and Accommodations
- Contact The Foundation for WWU & Alumni for this event if you have questions or need disability accommodations by calling (360) 650-3353 or emailing Alumni@wwu.edu.
- Advance notice for disability accommodations and special needs is greatly appreciated. Please indicate your special needs on the registration form.
- There will be auto-captions available for the Zoom webinar.
Visitor Parking at WWU on Weekdays
- Mon-Fri, 7:00am-4:30pm: limited paid parking is available at the south C lots and north 6V and 7G lots.
- Purchase your permit at the lot pay stations or use the Parkmobile app.
- More parking details for campus visitors are available online.
Parking at WWU on Weekdays for Visitors with Disabilities
- Mon-Fri, 7:00am-4:30pm: both a WWU permit and state disability placard are needed.
- Purchase your permit at the pay stations in lot C or 6V or use the Parkmobile app (use Zone 1200). This allows parking in any disability space. If these are full, you can use a non-reserved space nearby.
- More parking details for campus visitors with disabilities are available online.
The views expressed by our speaker do not necessarily reflect those of Western Washington University.
