Aurelius Prochazka, Ph.D., Principal Scientist

Aurelius (Aure) brings to Cool Earth Solar a unique combination of scientific research and commercial application development. Before joining Cool Earth, Aure was cofounder of two successful internet application development companies: Creative Internet Design in 1995 and ArsDigita Corporation in 1998. At ArsDigita, he was Vice President of Operations and ran the Los Angeles office, generating revenue at the rate of several million dollars per year. He has also developed some notably green websites, including the Environmental Defense Fund, Zipcar, and GoLoco websites. Aure coauthored the best-selling book RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails and taught "Software Engineering For Web Applications" at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California at Los Angeles.

At Caltech, Aure analyzed the aerodynamic stability of the F-117A Stealth Fighter and worked on vortex dynamics for his PhD thesis. Prior to graduate school, Aure attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). At both RPI and Caltech, he minored in Economics.

Aure's knack for knowing a good technical thing when he sees it—often long before others even suspect it's there—has been with him from his college days. For instance, at Caltech, he developed some of the earliest websites featuring online collaborations and user-contributed content. He also had the foresight to develop the guitar music game "Guitar Games" in 2002. In joining Cool Earth Solar in 2007, he believes he's found another technology that has the potential to change the world.

Publications:

• RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails, Hartl and Prochazka, Addison-Wesley, 2007.
• "On the two-dimensional stability of the axisymmetric Burgers vortex," Prochazka and Pullin, Physics of Fluids, v7 (7):1788–1790 (July 1995).