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| Guangdong Zhu |
As a youth growing up in China, Guangdong Zhu—or GD, for short—often had electric power on his mind, perhaps because it wasn’t always a reliable commodity. As he grew older, he considered that his interest in math, science, and technology might be applied to the power grid. And in college, he gravitated toward thermal engineering, influenced in part by an older friend who worked as an engineer at a local coal-fired power plant.
Guangdong’s bachelor’s degree from Northeast China Institute of Electric Power Engineering was followed by a master’s degree in thermal engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University. Wanting to pursue more varied research topics at a high level, he applied to various U.S. universities, settling on a doctorate program in mechanical engineering at the University of New Mexico (UNM), where he received a full scholarship. In his dissertation research, GD modeled flow within rock formations, with the goal of helping sequester carbon dioxide from power plants by pumping supercritical CO2 into saline aquifers.