Nov 27, 2017
DR. ERIK HELGREN and DR. KARINA GARBESI
Solar Suitcase Program at Cal State East Bay

Dr. Erik Helgren is a Bay Area native having grown up in San Francisco.  He attended UCLA, earning a B.S. in Physics in 1996, after which he spent a year working in Industry for Hughes/Raytheon Defense Systems in El Segundo, CA as a Systems Engineer.  He continued with his graduate education at UCLA and focussed on Condensed Matter Physics, specializing in microwave and millimeter-wave (or terahertz) spectroscopy techniques to study the electrodynamics of materials under the guidance of Dr. George Gruner and was awarded his doctorate in 2002.  Dr. Helgren took a post-doctoral position at UCSD working with Drs. Frances Hellman and Bob Dynes in the Department of Physics and his research focussed on magnetic semiconductor materials.  He accepted a joint position as an Assistant Project Scientist in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley & in the Materials Science Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and worked there until joining the faculty here at California State University East Bay.

 

Professor Karina Garbesi is the director of the Environmental Studies Program at Cal State East Bay. Garbesi hold’s a Master’s (1988) and PhD (1993) in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley. She has worked for over 25 years in the field of energy and sustainability. With an interdisciplinary background in physics, environmental engineering, energy, economics, and policy, and a passion for social justice, Garbesi takes a broad and applied approach to environmental problem solving. During her career Garbesi has consulted extensively on public interest energy issues, she has produced technical reports for local and federal governments, and she has performed as an expert witness at public hearings. She loves to involve students in her work through research-oriented course work, projects, and masters theses. Examples of such work include research that resulted in the installation of utility scale wind turbines in Eritrea, Africa, more equitable and sustainable micro-hydro projects in India, significant expansion of solar power in San Francisco, improved environmental justice in SE San Francisco through intervention in power plant citing and transmission line expansion cases. Garbesi also involves students actively in sustainability work on campus. Under her guidance her student have conducted two campus greenhouse gas emissions assessment, and the 2004 installation of 1 MW of solar power on CSUEB's Hayward campus.