Researchers, entrepreneurs, investors and students gathered at Duke University for a workshop focused on a central challenge in climate technology: how to move promising climate ideas out of the lab and into the real world at speed and scale.
Part of the Duke Climate Collaboration Symposia series, the January event brought together Duke leaders with investors and industry experts to share best practices, surface barriers to commercialization and map concrete research and student project opportunities. The event focused on climate tech and blue tech research applications, from ocean restoration to grid flexibility and more.
Hosted by Duke’s Design Climate Program, the Nicholas School of the Environment, Pratt School of Engineering, and Fuqua School of Business, the symposium emphasized that climate tech is about innovation, but it’s also about collaboration and translation.
“One of my biggest takeaways from our day together is that climate tech only works when engineers and scientists are fully integrated with policy, business, health and other applicable expertise—and when that collaboration happens efficiently,” said Sara Oliver, director of Duke’s Climate & Sustainability Engineering Master of Engineering program.
Duke’s place-based assets—from the Marine Lab and Duke Forest to campus infrastructure—serve as unique testbeds for piloting solutions. Entrepreneurial faculty, interdisciplinary research centers and a growing alumni investor network are strengths that were highlighted at the workshop.
Sara Oliver of the Pratt School of Engineering (right) was among the
organizers of the interdisciplinary convening.
organizers of the interdisciplinary convening.
Brian Silliman, Rachel Carson Distinguished Professor of Marine Conservation Biology at the Nicholas School, talked about the role of Focused Research Organizations (FROs) to bridge academia, industry and communities across disciplines and sectors when speed matters in tech transfer.
“Alone, advanced conservation and climate tech measures are not powerful enough to stop global warming or curtail it at a safe level. To meet the demand for rapid development and deployment of effective climate solutions, conservation science and technology must combine forces to generate solution synergies. This conference facilitated ideation on how to make that happen at Duke,” Silliman said.
The director of Duke RESTORE, a large-scale ecosystem restoration initiative that is an FRO, Silliman described how these partnerships can remove bottlenecks that prevent solutions from scaling. The Seagrass Farm Team is an FRO within Duke RESTORE that has identified seed supply and labor-intensive planting as key constraints to seagrass bed restoration. By developing drone- and clam-based methods to plant seagrass seeds and improving seagrass seed supply chains, the team is expanding the emphasis from academic outputs to monitoring, reporting and verification—what industry partners need to unlock capital through emerging blue carbon markets.
Translating research into products was a recurring theme of the workshop. Judy Ledlee, executive director of Duke’s Design Climate program, described how the initiative formed to address a persistent gap between world-class research and market-ready solutions. Launched in 2023, Design Climate pairs faculty research with student teams, industry mentors and structured support in customer discovery, prototyping and business model development.
“I’m incredibly proud of our Design Climate student innovators. Each group has taken real ownership of their ideas and is pushing the cutting edge within their discipline. One team worked closely with faculty entrepreneur Jason Somarelli. Through the Design Climate team’s customer discovery, prototyping work and persistence, they helped raise significant money to prototype a bioreactor to break down plastic waste. That kind of momentum, where student energy accelerates faculty innovation into tangible progress, is exactly what Design Climate was built to do,” Ledlee said.
In just two years, Design Climate has supported more than 25 ventures, catalyzed over $2.5 million in funding and helped launch new companies. Close collaboration with Duke’s Office of Translation & Commercialization, Ledlee noted, ensures that success is defined not by patents alone, but by measurable impact in the market.
Judy Ledlee (left) reflected on the early successes of the Design Climate model during a session spotlighting best practices for getting climate tech and blue tech research to market.
“What excites me most is this new wave of interdisciplinary innovators who care deeply about climate impact but also understand systems. They’re not just building technologies, they’re studying incentives, stakeholders, policy and user behavior. That systems-level thinking is what will unlock real, scalable change,” Ledlee said.
During the symposium, participants broke into industry-focused sessions to move from high-level discussion to opportunity mapping. In the climate resilience session, led by Duke Climate Leader in Residence Victoria Salinas, Oliver reflected that resilience solutions need communication married with technology.
“The most impactful climate resilience projects are those where engineers integrate climate science and technology with end-user and market needs. When teams listen closely to stakeholders and translate impact and risk into business-relevant value, adoption and scale follow,” Oliver said.
The oceans and blue tech session, facilitated by John Virdin of the Nicholas Institute and Stephanie Rousso of Oceans@Duke, centered on the idea of “the ocean as an asset.” Participants highlighted the need for credible monitoring frameworks, clearer market demand signals and case studies from regions with streamlined permitting to minimize risk in investment. Integrating community-level benefits into return-on-investment calculations emerged as essential for long-term success.
Other sessions examined the commercial applications of plastics sustainability and grid technology research. In the grid tech discussion, led by Fuqua School of Business Professor David Brown, participants explored how flexible demand, smarter storage management, and improved short-term grid operations could help meet surging electricity demand without sacrificing reliability or affordability.
Katie Kross, of Fuqua’s Center for Energy, Development, and the Global Environment (EDGE), emphasized that Duke is well positioned to help create and scale up climate solutions.
“Developing innovative solutions to issues like climate resilience, electric grid transformation and ocean microplastic waste requires interdisciplinary research—something Duke is uniquely well suited for. The important next step for us is getting more of our interdisciplinary research out into commercialized applications at scale,” Kross said.
The Duke Climate Collaboration Symposia series is managed by the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability and funded by a gift from The Duke Endowment in support of the Duke Climate Commitment, which unites the university’s education, research, operations and public service missions to address climate challenges.
