Benjamin Lee is the Next Speaker in the Mudd Lecture Series The professor of electrical and systems engineering and of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania will give a lecture on Jan. 22 in Stackhouse Theater.

Office of Communications and Public Affairs
January 8, 2026

Benjamin Lee, professor of electrical and systems engineering and professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, will deliver a lecture at 5:10 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 22, in Stackhouse Theater in Elrod Commons as part of W&L’s Mudd Center for Ethics’ series, “Taking Place: Land Use and Environmental Impact.”

The event, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Toward Sustainable Data Centers for Artificial Intelligence.” The lecture will be streamed online and a recording will be available after the event.

As the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to proliferate, it is important to assess and mitigate its energy demands and environmental impact. In his talk, Lee will provide a broad perspective on sustainable computing and the various directions for future work. He will discuss strategies for mitigating the energy used by AI computation and datacenter infrastructure, which require analyzing the energy and carbon implications of AI growth, re-thinking datacenter infrastructure and defining a solution space for sustainable computation with renewable energy, utility-scale batteries and job scheduling. Ultimately, the strategies should incentivize data centers to modulate their power usage in ways that also reflect their performance goals.

Lee’s research focuses on computer architecture (microprocessors, memories and datacenters), energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. He builds interdisciplinary links to machine learning and algorithmic economics to deter design and manage computer systems. In addition to his faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, Lee is a visiting researcher at Google. He has held visiting positions at Meta AI, Microsoft Research, Intel Labs and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and he is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Scientist. Lee received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley, his Ph.D. from Harvard University and his post-doctorate from Stanford University.

For more information and a complete schedule of events, visit the Mudd Center for Ethics’ series webpage.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the university from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. Previous Mudd Center lecture series themes have included “Global Ethics in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities,” “Race and Justice in America,” “The Ethics of Citizenship,” “Markets and Morals,” “Equality and Difference,” “The Ethics of Identity,” “The Ethics of Technology,” “Daily Ethics: How Individual Choices and Habits Express Our Values and Shape Our World, “Beneficence: Practicing and Ethics of Care,” “The Ethics of Design” and “How We Live and Die: Stories, Values and Communities.”