William Pickard

Biography

Senior Professor William Pickard is a live fellow of IEEE and a professional engineer, registered in Missouri. After receiving his degrees Professor Pickard held postdoctoral appointments, first at Harvard and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since then, he has pursued a continuously evolving career in teaching and academic research, the preponderance of which has been spent as a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at Washington University in Saint Louis, St. Louis, MO. His research areas have included: high voltage engineering; electrobiology; the biological effects of electromagnetic fields; and biological transport & systems biology. He now concentrates upon the theory and practice of massive energy storage because the sustainability of our industrial civilization depends upon reliable dispatchable energy even though the major renewables are notoriously intermittent.

Current Research

His current foci are: 1) exploring likely trajectories that the fossil fuels may follow on their way to exhaustion; 2) evangelizing the importance of preparing now for that exhaustion; 3) evaluating the sustainability of tomorrow's renewable energy sources; and 4) discerning the potential realism of proposed energy storage technologies.