Diego Acevedo’s grand life – from kite surfing in his Aruba neighborhood to three engineering degrees from three countries – stems from mere curiosity. Maybe a bit of restlessness, too.
Born in Colombia, Acevedo, Ph.D., earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Florida in 2003. There, he met his wife, Monica Nucete, and within 20 years of marriage, the two embarked on a global tour of education and engineering that wove through Gainesville, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, and, now, Aruba. They are the parents of Lucas, 2, and Ema, 15.
Nucete is a high school biology teacher, and Acevedo is a professor and researcher at the University of Aruba. He serves on the Pan-American Marine Energy Association board and has done much work on ocean thermal energy systems and offshore solar systems.
“In Aruba, Diego has been exploring the high penetration of renewables on small grids and resource recovery from desalination brines,” noted Mary Church, senior director of development for UF’s department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
Next to the academic career, Acevedo, and his business partner, Frank Timmen, operate Happyponics VBA, a hydroponics farm that hosts weekly farmers markets. Yet a large chunk of Acevedo’s life is making Aruba more sustainable and resilient to environmental changes.
“My daughter says I have three or four jobs,” Acevedo said. “My day job is working at the University of Aruba. The way I try to explain the program is an academic start-up. We’ve come up with a new program for islands, by islands. This was done with the support of the European Union.”
He and his students look at energy, waste, water and wastewater. They examine how the built environment relates to the natural environment, and they tour the island once a year to see every system.
“Where do we get our water? Where does the waste go? How do we get our energy – renewables such as wind and solar,” he said of the annual island tour.
Part of the program includes bio-environmental sciences, with an eye on mangroves ecosystems, coral ecosystems and beach erosion.
“Because I am an engineer,” he said, “I am attracted to technical solutions. We have this program here called Sustainable Island Solutions Through STEM (SISSTEM). It is not a traditional engineering degree. It is a STEM-focused degree – bachelor’s and master’s. What we really try to do is solve issues that are common on islands.”
His Ph.D. research centered on the valorization of brines from the desalination systems, which could result in diversification of an island economy while providing stronger-and-lighter materials for the global energy transition.
“There is quite a lot of opportunity to recover some resources from the salt water,” he explained. “We put a lot of energy and effort into processing seawater, making freshwater out of it. It’s a shame if those concentrated salts return to the ocean. We can actually recover, for instance, magnesium; I think there is a huge potential in that.”
This has large implications, especially as automobile manufacturers are looking to reduce the weight of vehicles.
“Magnesium is one of the lightest structural metals,” he said.
“One of the things I have been obsessed with over the last year is that potential for magnesium to provide a very interesting alternative to structural metals, like aluminum or steel. If we can do this cheap enough, and I think we can, when we take it out of concentrated brine sources, like the desalination brine and use a cheap renewable energy source in places where you have a lot of wind and solar, like in Aruba, I believe we can get to an important enough contribution to generate magnesium metal, to provide alternatives on the bigger scale.”
Those are big ideas from a small island. But Acevedo contends, “The islands can show the way.”
Most of the world looks to the future capped in crisis – shortages of water, energy, food.
“But in a place like Aruba, we don’t have that,” he said. “For decades, we’ve been 100% dependent on the water from the ocean. Energy has always been imported. We don’t have oil reserves here, so we were pioneers in large-scale renewable energy. Same with food systems, which is one of my other jobs. I have a technology-focused greenhouse. How do we grow things in a tropical desert location?”
The work is the latest chapter in globetrotting after he and Nucete graduated from UF. They moved to South Florida, where he worked for a machinery company; it bought a factory in France, where the Acevedos lived until their daughter was born.
They earned their master’s degrees in The Netherlands, Nucete’s in biology and education from Leiden University and Acevedo’s in sustainable energy from Delft University of Technology. After a few years they moved to Aruba where after a few years Diego got a joint PhD position at the University of Aruba and the KU Leuven in Belgium. He defended his PhD in May 2024.
Nucete is originally from Aruba, and Acevedo said the island is a great place to raise a family, a safe place with good people, beaches and enough challenges to satisfy an engineer.
Much of that curiosity started in Gainesville.
“Gainesville was fun,” he said. “I found it very easy to relate to people there. There were people from all over the place, and I was able to get involved in a lot of things.”
He also took the LSAT and was accepted into UF’s law school.
“I registered, and then a couple of weeks before I was to start classes, I got this job offer to work on the commercial side for an engineering company, so I did not follow that path to go to law school,” he said. “I still think before 60 I’m going to get a law degree just because I’m curious – curious and a little crazy.”
Crazy?
Perhaps. But Acevedo wants to combine the social and environmental sides of his work – the man-made laws with nature’s laws.
“To get important solutions out there, it’s not just the technology,” he said. “A lot of engineers are dead set on efficiency and dead set on making the perfect machine. You still need people. Social acceptance. You still need to comply with regulations. You still need to make sure the political climate where this thing will be implemented actually works because it is going to generate jobs or not take away jobs.
“I get concerned sometimes that on the engineering side, we forget these things. We forget the people sometimes, so I try to bring those together.”
Acevedo also is a runner who took on the Paris marathon in 2022.
“I just wanted to see if I could do it because I was never very sporty,” he said.
“I also picked up an instrument recently. I am not very musical, but I wondered if YouTube could teach me how to play the guitar. It’s not so bad,” he said. “It’s been on the wall for maybe eight years. Then I decided, ‘Well, let me see if I can tune it and see if anything can come out of it.”
The first song he learned was “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley.
“I’m now realizing I’m hyperactive,” he said, laughing.
Indeed, that is a big plate with many noble quests. So what makes him most proud?
“That’s very difficult,” he answered. “I haven’t gotten there yet. I want to do something impactful. I have been very lucky. I have a very good life. But there is still a lot of work to do.”
Read this story on Powering The New Engineer News from Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering
Story & Editing by: Dave Schlenker
Public Relations Specialist II
UF Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering
January 7, 2025