Melissa Pappas
Lorena Grundy, Penn Engineering’s new Practice Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, decided she wanted to be an engineer to make a difference in the world. She imagined she would one day drive her own research in the realm of energy and sustainability, but an unexpected experience during her doctoral studies changed her entire outlook on how she could best make an impact in the field.
Grundy earned a bachelor’s in Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton in 2017. While pursuing her undergraduate degree, Grundy had her first research experience working with Professor Rodney Priestley on the physics of block copolymer nanoparticles. Polymers are long strings of repeating chemical units that have many different types of physical characteristics depending on what those units are and how they are assembled. DNA and plastics are polymers, as are rubber and silk. Grundy was examining how using block copolymers, two different polymer chains bonded together, instead of homopolymers (those which contain only one kind of repeat unit), affects the structure of nanoparticles.
“I ended up falling in love with polymer physics and decided to find a way to combine my passion for polymers with my passion to solve energy challenges in my next research project,” says Grundy. “That’s when I found an opportunity to do a Ph.D. with Professor Nitash Balsara at UC Berkeley.”
In her doctoral research, Grundy studied how polymers could be used to create solid electrolytes for lithium metal batteries in an endeavor to create smaller and lighter batteries that can store more energy for renewable energy applications such as energy storage for electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels.
While pursuing her Ph.D., Grundy was required to reserve time in her busy schedule to teach undergraduate courses, something she was initially worried about. However, after teaching her first class, something shifted in her desire to contribute to the field.
“I remember being concerned about teaching, since I wanted to spend all of my time on my research,” says Grundy. “Now I think back and realize how I completely changed my outlook on the responsibility after my first day. I found that I loved teaching, maybe even more than my research.”
Grundy went above and beyond, taking on many more hours as a teaching assistant than was necessary to fulfill her teaching commitment. She ended up receiving three outstanding teaching awards and found every excuse to teach while working on her engineering dissertation.
“When I started to fall in love with this kind of work, I knew I had to refocus my career path to one that would allow me to spend the majority of my time teaching,” she says. “I enjoyed being with students one-on-one and connecting with them as people. I also loved the immediate gratification that comes when a student would walk into my office unsure about a topic, and then after a meeting together, would leave feeling confident and excited about that topic. It’s really one of the most rewarding jobs there is.”
For her postdoctoral studies, Grundy transitioned into the educational field, pursuing chemical engineering education at Tufts University with Professor Milo Koretsky in 2022, with support from a fellowship from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE).
“My biggest challenge was going from reading chemical engineering articles about how lithium anodes work in batteries to reading theoretical books and education articles and learning how to write for that type of audience,” she says. “It was a major adjustment where I needed to figure out how to translate my technical engineering experience to what I was reading and learning in the education space, and then learn the language to express my ideas across audiences.”
With both the technical engineering and the theoretical educational research under her belt, Grundy landed a practice assistant professorship with Penn Engineering this past summer.
“I chose to come to Penn because it was clear that people here care about energy and sustainability issues and are already invested in many different approaches to solving them,” says Grundy. “I came into my interview prepared to convince everyone why educating our students in this area was important and was pleasantly surprised when I didn’t have to. There are so many experts here working on these issues, who I am excited to learn from and collaborate with, but there are also areas that I can see my experience and passions filling. Penn feels like the place where I will be able to make the biggest impact.”
Rather than making an impact through her own research, Grundy sees an even greater potential to make an impact on real-world problems in energy and sustainability by preparing the next generation to solve them.
“My own research may only go so far, but my teaching and mentoring can go as far as all the students who I’d have the opportunity to teach,” she says. “This allows my impact to become much greater through work I thoroughly enjoy and feel that I have a natural talent for.”
Grundy’s position at Penn Engineering is focused on preparing the next generation of engineers to solve current and future energy and sustainability problems. She is teaching two courses this semester, one of which is an upper-level introductory course in energy and sustainability.
“My intention is to design this course in a way that it remains flexible and adaptable to students’ feedback,” she says. “This is very important to me because I want students to feel excited about the content they are learning.”
Grundy plans on incorporating active learning into her course design, a more effective way of teaching that she became familiar with during her postdoctoral research, as well as multiple interdisciplinary classes. Specifically, Grundy plans to work with the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy to help engineering and STEM students gain a holistic understanding of how to drive real-world solutions.
“The final project will require students to choose one energy and sustainability issue in their community and advocate for change,” says Grundy. “This project will test their ability to combine technical engineering, policy, science communication and community engagement knowledge, encouraging them to bring the oftentimes forgotten human side to engineering problems.”
Throughout her time at Penn Engineering, Grundy will be encouraging students to share their struggles, excitement and hopes and dreams with her to not only help them, but to help her create an even better course for future students.
“I will feel that I have had a successful first semester if I end it with tons of student-inspired ideas,” she says. “I hope to learn as much from my students as they learn from me.”
Grundy also hopes to connect with faculty working on energy and sustainability problems across Penn Engineering and beyond to bridge both research and educational gaps.
“I look forward to leveraging my own experience learning the languages of both of those disciplines in my previous positions and the new experiences I will gain from learning from the wonderful students at Penn to create more avenues for students to get involved.”
Grundy will be teaching Material and Energy Balances of Chemical Processes and Energy and Sustainability: Science, Engineering and Technology this fall. Learn more about her work and teaching philosophy by visiting her website.