In recent decades, carbon emissions in the aviation sector have grown faster than in shipping, rail, or road. What’s more, aviation presents one of the biggest challenges for decarbonization, given that there’s no aircraft equivalent of the electric cars that are becoming increasingly popular.

That might change in the future, though, if Xiao-Dong Zhou, Director of the Center for Clean Energy Engineering and the Nicholas E. Madonna Chair in Sustainability at UConn, and his students have anything to say about it.

One of their projects involves using fuel cell technology to develop electrically powered aircraft – something they’ve demonstrated can be done in a prototype. That kind of hands-on experimentation is critical, Zhou explains.

“We are not only doing research, we are also training students to get excited about this field,” he says.