Help shape the Center’s research agenda
Engage with MIT research teams and other industry leaders
Receive timely analysis, including cutting-edge research findings and insights
Participate in monthly seminars addressing emerging technologies, energy policy, and sustainability issues
Attend MITEI’s Annual Research Conference, framing the latest technology, economic and policy drivers shaping the energy landscape
Attend MITEI’s Spring Symposium, offering a deeper understanding of a timely energy transition topic
Randall Field is executive director of the MITEI’s Future Energy Systems Center which examines the accelerating energy transition as emerging technologies, policies, demographics, and economics reshaping the landscape of energy supply and demand. He is also executive director of MIT’s Fusion Study examining the global multidecadal dynamics of the energy transition and how fusion energy can contribute to decarbonizing global energy systems. He was previously executive director for MITEI’s Mobility Systems Center, assessing the impact of transformations in vehicle and fuel technologies, service and business models, and consumer behavior in the movement of both passengers and goods. He was also executive director for MIT’s Mobility of the Future study which produced the Insights in the Future Mobility report covering global projections of alternative fuel vehicle fleets and energy consumption, deployment of charging and fueling infrastructure, attitudes towards mobility, and the impacts of innovative technologies and business models on urban mobility. As executive director for the Conversion Research Program at MIT for 10 years, Field worked with a multidisciplinary team of researchers to explore various conversion technologies for production of alternative fuels. Prior to MIT, Field worked for Aspen Technology for 23 years. Field received a SM in chemical engineering practice from MIT and a BS in chemical engineering from Caltech.
Emre Gençer is a principal research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative. The central theme of his research is to identify optimal utilization of resources for the evolving energy system facing the dual challenge of increasing demand while profoundly reducing its environmental footprint. His research focuses on integration of emerging and conventional energy technologies, their policy implications, multiscale modeling, and optimization. He is the principal investigator of various ongoing projects at MIT including Understanding Carbon Mitigation Technologies, Analysis of Options towards Fully Decarbonized EU by 2050, and Exploring Power and Transport Sector Decarbonization Pathways via Direct and Indirect use of Electricity. He is the lead developer and chief architect of a novel software platform called Sustainable Energy Systems Analysis Modeling Environment (SESAME), which provides comprehensive cost and sustainability assessment for the converging electric power, transportation, and industrial sectors to decision makers and technology analysts with high technological, temporal, and geospatial resolution. He was lead on the chemical storage chapter of The Future of Energy Storage report and co-lead on the thermal storage chapter.
William H. Green, the Hoyt C. Hottel Professor at MIT, is a world leader in chemical kinetics, reaction engineering, prediction of chemical reactions and properties, and in development of related software. He has led many combined experimental/modeling research projects related to fuels, combustion, pyrolysis, and oxidative stability, and he invented an instrument to directly measure rate coefficients for multi-channel reactions. He developed computer methods to predict the behavior of complicated reacting mixtures, many of which are included in the open source Reaction Mechanism Generator software package, a type of AI expert system for reactive chemistry. The associated popular website rmg.mit.edu includes estimators for many chemical properties and several databases. Green co-invented several algorithms and numerical methods helpful for handling complicated chemical kinetics. His group has also developed machine-learning methods and software (ASKCOS and Chemprop) for accurately predicting the products of organic reactions and for predicting many chemical and reaction properties. Chemprop, whose recent versions were developed primarily by Green’s research group, is currently the most popular open-source chemistry software on GitHub. It is heavily used by the pharmaceutical industry, to predict the properties of proposed new drug molecules. Green also invents and analyzes technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in the transportation/fuel sector. Two of his greenhouse-gas reduction inventions are now being commercialized, one by Thiozen, a company he co-founded. Recently he has been developing and analyzing technology options for decarbonizing the freight sector, with a special interest in long-haul trucking.
Green earned his BA from Swarthmore College, and his PhD in physical chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of C. Bradley Moore. After postdocs at Cambridge University with Nicholas Handy and at the University of Pennsylvania with Marsha Lester, he worked for Exxon Research & Engineering for six years before joining the Chemical Engineering faculty at MIT in 1997. Green has co-authored more than 350 journal articles, which have been cited more than 23,000 times. He is a fellow of the AAAS and of the Combustion Institute, and has received the American Chemical Society’s Glenn Award in Energy & Fuel Chemistry and the AIChE’s Wilhelm Award in Reaction Engineering. He convened and organized the International Conference on Chemical Kinetics in 2011, and now serves as treasurer of that conference series. More than 20 of his former graduate or postdoctoral students are now tenured or tenure-track faculty. He previously served as the editor of the International Journal of Chemical Kinetics, as the faculty chair of MIT’s Mobility of the Future project, and as the executive officer of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering. He was appointed director of the MIT Energy Initiative in Spring 2024.
Howard J. Herzog is a senior research engineer in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). He received his undergraduate and graduate education in chemical engineering at MIT. He has industrial experience with Eastman Kodak, Stone & Webster, Aspen Technology, and Spectra Physics. Since 1989, he has been on the MIT research staff, where he works on sponsored research involving energy and the environment, with an emphasis on greenhouse gas mitigation technologies. He was a coordinating lead author for the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage (released September 2005), a co-author on the MIT Future of Coal Study (released March 2007), and a U.S. delegate to the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum’s Technical Group (June 2003-September 2007). He was awarded the 2010 Greenman Award by the IEAGHG “in recognition of contributions made to the development of greenhouse gas control technologies.” In 2018, he authored a book entitled Carbon Capture for the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series.
Christopher Knittel is the deputy director of policy at MITEI and the George P. Shultz Professor of Energy Economics in the Sloan School of Management MIT. He is also the director of MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, which has served as the hub for social science research on energy and the environmental since the late 1970s. Knittel is also a co-director of The E2e Project, a research initiative between MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Chicago, to undertake rigorous evaluation of energy efficiency investments. He joined the faculty at MIT in 2011, having taught previously at UC Davis and Boston University. At MIT, he teaches Energy Economics and Policy to undergraduates, MBA students, and graduate students from outside of the Sloan School of Management.
Robert Stoner is the founding director of the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design. He was previously MITEI’s deputy director for science and technology. Stoner is currently a member of the MIT Energy Council. He also serves on the Board of Directors of, and the Science and Technology Committee of, the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, which oversees the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and as a member and secretary of the Global Commission to End Energy Poverty.
Stoner is the inventor of numerous computational and ultrafast optical measurement techniques and has built and managed successful technology firms in the semiconductor, IT, and optics industries. From 2007 through 2009, he lived and worked in Africa and India while serving in a variety of senior roles within the Clinton Foundation, including as the CEO of the Clinton Development Initiative, and director of the Clinton Climate Initiative for Africa. His present research at MIT focuses on solutions to energy poverty, and the design and optimization of energy systems and business models in the developing world. He earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from Queen’s University and Ph.D. from Brown University in condensed matter physics.
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