Professor Roland Winston Joins International Solar Board

Professor Roland Winston, director of UC Solar, has been invited to join the board of directors for an international solar energy group called SERIIUS — the Solar Energy Research Institute for India and the United States.

Winston joins a Nobel Prize winner, the director of Notre Dame’s Energy Center and several other notable scientists and scholars leading the institute.

“I am very pleased to join the board of advisors to this important program in solar energy between the U.S. and India,” Winston said. “My contact with solar energy research in India dates back to 2000 when I was named solar person of the year there.

“More recently Dean Daniel Hirleman (of the School of Engineering) has established significant connections between UC Merced and universities in India. This appointment fits in well with the growing ties between our campus and research institutions in India.” 

SERIIUS’s goals include developing and preparing emerging and revolutionary solar electricity technologies that advance the long-term success of India's Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Energy Mission and the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot Initiative; accelerating the development of solar electric technologies by lowering the cost per watt of photovoltaics and concentrated solar power; focusing on high-impact fundamental and applied research and development; creating a new platform for bi-national collaboration; and creating a strong workforce-development program in solar energy science and technology.

"Solar energy is part UC Merced’s strategic focuses on sustainability and renewable energy, and Professor Winston is the key faculty member in the solar field,” Hirleman said. “I am quite pleased for him – and for our campus – with this notable appointment.”

Winston is a pioneer in nonimaging optics, a science concerned with collecting, concentrating, transporting and distributing light energy in applications such as solar energy, signal detection, illumination optics, and measurement and testing.

He is a founding faculty member at UC Merced, a distinguished professor, a multiple-patent holder and a multiple award winner for his many accomplishments in physics. He’s considered one of the United States’s leading experts in solar power.

His board colleagues include Joan Brennecke, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of the Energy Center at the University of Notre Dame;  Walter Kohn, professor with the Department of Physics at University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Nobel winner for chemistry in 1998; Ajeet Rohatgi, a regent’s professor in the College of Engineering and the director of the University Center of Excellence for Photovoltaic Research and Education Electrical Energy at the Georgia Institute of Technology; Gautam Biswas, a professor and the director of the Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute in Durgapur, India; and Viresh Dutta, professor with the Centre for Energy Studies, IIT-Delhi, India.