A native of New Orleans, high school student Ben Verlander knew quite well the challenges that climate change poses for frontline communities, and he wanted to do something about it. He wrote about this desire in his application for Duke’s Alumni Endowed Scholars Program, and it came up in his interview process.
“They asked me about electric buses,” he recalls. The question challenged Verlander to assess the tradeoffs inherent to the electrification of transportation—what about the emissions generated in the process of manufacturing the bus? What if the electricity powering the buses isn’t clean?
Verlander won the scholarship and entered Duke in the fall of 2022 as a student in the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. After transferring to the Pratt School of Engineering, he’ll graduate in May 2026 with a major in mechanical engineering and a minor in energy engineering.
In the fall of his sophomore year, Verlander took a course that cemented his decision to become an engineer. Modern Power Systems, a Pratt course taught by Gendell Family Professor of the Practice Neal Simmons, challenged students to consider the same types of tradeoffs that Verlander been asked about during his scholarship interview, centering a technical perspective. Simmons spent the first half-hour of each Friday class meeting discussing current events in the energy sector.
Verlander relished the opportunity. “We had an on-demand energy expert that we could talk to every week,” he says. Simmons also encouraged students to venture out of their comfort zones as they grappled with questions of complex technological design—experience that has since served Verlander well.
The following semester, he led a team of peers in a pro bono consulting project organized through the Duke Energy and Climate Club, which he had joined as a first-year student and which the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability advises. The client, a large clean energy developer, sought to assess failure risks in some of its older solar assets.
The team’s work impressed the client enough that Verlander was offered a summer internship with the company. Some of his teammates also wanted to keep advancing the project—and Verlander saw the value of continued interdisciplinary collaboration. So he worked with the company to create two additional positions funded by the Nicholas Institute’s Energy Internship Program.
“It was this cool mix of a real challenge faced by a company here in Durham, plus the community created by the Energy and Climate Club, plus resources at the Nicholas Institute—all those factors came together to give a group of students more experiences in this space,” he says. Verlander would repeat the feat in the summer of 2025, working with the same client to facilitate summer opportunities for his peers via the Energy Internship Program.
It was not the last time that he leveraged Nicholas Institute resources in service of a collective goal. In 2025, Verlander joined an interdisciplinary team of undergraduates to compete in the EnergyTech University Prize Competition organized by the U.S. Department of Energy. With Institute sponsorship supporting their participation, the team brought home the $20,000 Geothermal Technologies Office Bonus Prize. Enhanced geothermal systems have subsequently become a major focus of Verlander’s senior year, as he conducts related projects through Duke’s Design Climate program and his mechanical engineering capstone.
After graduation, Verlander will put his experience to work at the renewable energy developer DESRI, where he’ll be part of a growing Blue Devil contingent that will include another member of his competition team.
Asked how he would answer that question about electric buses now, he chuckles at how far he has come. “It’s funny thinking back,” he says, “Obviously, I could articulate a much more robust answer to that question these days. Back then, I understood the rough big picture, but it’s fun to realize how much more able I am to think and talk about these problems now. That’s a cool thing that Duke has given to me.”
Profile by Bryan Koen, Assistant Director for Education & Experiential Learning, Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability