The MIT Energy Initiative will hold the Future Energy Systems Center Fall Meeting and Workshop and Advisory Meeting on October 11-13, 2022. The workshop is designed to give Center Members the opportunity to learn about the progress on 14 Center projects that are underway and to engage with the research teams during the formal Q&A and the informal breakout sessions. The workshop program also includes presentations on other MIT research that are important to the energy transition; guest speakers discussing pressing issues such as the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act, the challenges of decarbonizing industry, and the practical considerations in selecting energy carriers; and in-person discussions with project research teams.
The Center Advisory Committee meeting is the opportunity for Member companies to express their interests and priorities as we enter the next cycle of project ideation.
Attendance at the Fall Meeting Workshop is restricted to Members of the Future Energy Systems Center and invited members of the MIT Community.
| Tuesday, October 11 | |
| 8:00-8:30 am ET | Breakfast and registration |
| 8:30-8:45 am ET | Welcome and opening remarks Robert Armstrong, Director, MIT Energy Initiative; Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering Randall Field, Executive Director, Future Energy Systems Center |
| 8:45-9:30 am ET | The role of policy in accelerating the energy transition Robert Armstrong, Director, MIT Energy Initiative; Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering Christopher Knittel, Deputy Director for Policy, MIT Energy Initiative; George P. Shultz Professor of Energy Economics, MIT Sloan School of Management; Director, MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research Robert Stoner, Deputy Director for Science and Technology, MIT Energy Initiative |
| 9:30-9:45 am ET | Break |
| 9:45-11:00 am ET | Decarbonization of industry Moderator: Randall Field, Executive Director, Future Energy Systems Center
Randolph Kirchain, Co-Director, MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub |
| 11:00-11:15 am ET | Break |
| 11:15 am-12:15 pm ET | Negative emissions Moderator: Howard J. Herzog, Senior Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative
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| 12:15-1:15 pm ET | Lunch |
| 1:15-2:15 pm ET | Hydrogen production Moderator: Randall Field, Executive Director, Future Energy Systems Center
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| 2:15-3:00 pm ET | Informal, in person conversations with project teams
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| 3:00-3:15 pm ET | Networking break |
| 3:15-5:00 pm ET | Industry panel on energy carriers Moderator: Emre Gençer, Principal Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative
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| 6:00 pm ET | Reception and dinner at the MIT Museum |
| Wednesday, October 12 | |
| 8:00-8:30 am ET | Breakfast and registration |
| 8:30-10:00 am ET | Decarbonization of buildings Moderator: Dharik S. Mallapragada, Principal Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative
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| 10:00-10:15 am ET | Networking break |
| 10:15-11:15 am ET |
Transportation Moderator: Randall Field, Executive Director, Future Energy Systems Center
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| 11:15-11:45 am ET | Informal, in person discussions with project teams
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| 11:45 am-1:00 pm ET | Lunch |
| 1:00-1:30 pm ET | International freight Moderator: Randall Field, Executive Director, Future Energy Systems Center
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| 1:30-3:00 pm ET | System and network analysis for energy in transportation Moderator: Randall Field, Executive Director, Future Energy Systems Center
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| 3:00-3:45 pm ET | Informal, in person discussions with project teams
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| 3:45-4:00 pm ET | Networking break |
| 4:00-5:00 pm ET | Low-carbon infrastructure planning Moderator: Robert Stoner, Deputy Director for Science and Technology, MIT Energy Initiative
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| 5:15 pm ET | Meeting end with light reception |
| Thursday, October 13 | |
| 8:00-8:30 am ET | Breakfast and registration |
| 8:30 am-12:00 pm ET | Center Advisory Committee Meeting |
| 12:00 pm ET | Meeting end Boxed lunch will be provided. |
Director, MIT Energy Initiative; Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering, MIT
Robert C. Armstrong directs the MIT Energy Initiative, an Institute-wide effort at MIT linking science, technology, and policy to transform the world’s energy systems. A member of the MIT faculty since 1973, Armstrong served as head of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 1996 to 2007. He was appointed as director of MITEI in 2013, after serving as the organization’s deputy director from 2007-2013 with founding director Ernest Moniz. His research is focused on pathways to a low-carbon energy future.
Armstrong has been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020) and the National Academy of Engineering (2008). He received the 2006 Bingham Medal from the Society of Rheology, which is devoted to the study of the science of deformation and flow of matter, and the Founders Award (2020), Warren K. Lewis Award(2006), and the Professional Progress Award (1992) from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
Armstrong chaired the recent MIT’s The Future of Energy Storage study and was a member of MIT’s Future of Natural Gas and Future of Solar Energy study groups. He advised the teams that developed MITEI’s recent reports, The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World (2018) and Insights into Future Mobility (2019). He co-edited Game Changers: Energy on the Move with former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz.
Head of Data Analytics, Carbon Arc
Marc Barbar received his undergraduate degree from the Pennsylvania State University and his PhD from MIT. He was a research assistant the MIT Energy Initiative working on decision-making under uncertainty from electric power system planning and operation. He is currently the Head of Data Analytics at the NYC-based startup Carbon Arc working on decision intelligence.
Director for US Policy and Regulatory Strategy, National Grid
Karsten Barde helps lead policy & regulatory strategy for National Grid’s electric & gas utility businesses in New York and Massachusetts. His team manages the company’s state policy agendas, focused on creating the necessary conditions for reliable, affordable and rapid clean energy deployment.
For more than a decade, Barde has developed and led innovation in the utility industry, developing businesses cases and regulatory proposals for new programs, services, investments, and policies. He served as a manager in National Grid’s New Energy Solutions group, developing new product offerings for electric transportation, distributed generation, and advanced metering, among other areas. He led the company’s first electric transportation filings in Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island, securing approvals for more than $40 million in initial program investments. Prior to National Grid, Barde was part of Pacific Gas & Electric’s management rotation program in San Francisco, CA, supporting the Energy Procurement and Smart Grid teams with implementation of state energy and climate policy.
In his early career, Barde worked for a Boston-based social venture fund and helped run a state legislator’s campaign in Vermont.
Barde lives in Arlington, MA with his family, including his two sons (ages 3 and 6). He holds an MBA and undergraduate degree from Dartmouth.
Lammot du Pont Professor of Chemical Engineering, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering
Paul Barton is the Lammot du Pont Professor of Chemical Engineering in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering. His research interests include dynamic modeling, simulation and optimization, hybrid and embedded systems, mixed-integer and global optimization theory and algorithms, design and operation of micro-scale chemical processes, systems biology, and energy systems engineering.
PhD Candidate, Building Technology, MIT
Zachary Berzolla is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Building Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He uses urban building energy modeling to help communities around the world meet their emissions reduction goals in the built environment. Through these collaborative efforts, communities define and test technology pathways that include differing levels of building retrofits, heat electrification, and renewables. His current focus is how to equitably advance the adoption of building retrofits to attain ambitious but necessary emissions reduction goals. Prior to MIT he worked on an energy systems model for ISO-NE while researching at Dartmouth and spent time with the commercial buildings group at NREL. He holds a Master’s in building technology from MIT and dual Bachelor’s degrees in physics and energy systems engineering from Middlebury and Dartmouth, respectively.
Energy and Industrial Decarbonization Director, Braskem
Gustavo Checcucci is the director of Energy and Industrial Decarbonization at Braskem. He holds a degree in electrical engineering from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), a specialization in energy from Salvador University, an executive MBA in finance from INSPER, and advanced management program from Harvard Business School.
With over 20 years of experience in the energy sector, Checcucci began his professional career at Coelba, a local electrical distribution company in Brazil. He joined Braskem as an energy process engineer in Camaçari in 2005 and has led the corporate directory of Energy since 2013.
Responsible for Braskem’s global management and commercialization of energy at the company, he leads the global industrial decarbonization program focused on reducing Braskem’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions by 15% by 2030. He is a member of the board of directors of Braskem’s affiliated power generation companies and of the Brazilian Operator of the Transmission System – ONS.
Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative
Pablo Duenas-Martinez is a research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative, research assistant professor at Universidad Pontificia Comillas, and a gas-electricity advisor for the Florence School of Regulation at the European University Institute. His research area embeds the economic and regulatory modeling and analysis, and the role of traditional and new generation technologies in shaping the energy systems of the future, in low- to high-income countries, within a carbon-constrained world. He has published on topics such as liberalization and regulation of gas and electricity markets, energy security of supply and resiliency in decarbonizing economies, impact of distributed energy resources, analysis and regulation for universal energy access, and mathematical modeling of energy systems. During his career, he has worked with power and gas utilities, as well as government and regulatory agencies, on research projects and to provide advice aimed at improving operations and investments in energy systems worldwide. He obtained his BS in industrial engineering, MS in electric power systems, and PhD in electrical engineering at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid, Spain; and received a BS in economics from the National Distance Education University in Madrid, Spain.
Postdoctoral Researcher, MIT Energy Initiative
Vladimir Dvorkin is a MSCA postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before MIT, he pursued a PhD degree in EE at the Technical University of Denmark. He was also with the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering of Georgia Tech as a visiting scholar. In his PhD, Dvorkin has worked on energy transition through the lens of decision-making models under uncertainty, economics of uncertainty, and algorithmic privacy. Today, he broadens this portfolio towards certifying decisions under uncertainty, providing privacy guarantees for arbitrary energy datasets, and developing optimization algorithms to assist machine learning tasks in energy.
Research Scientist, MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Sebastian Eastham is a principal research scientist at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and the Center for Global Change Science. His work is focused on understanding and reducing the atmospheric impacts of anthropogenic emissions using high-resolution computational models of the atmosphere in concert with Earth observations. This ranges from high-fidelity local simulations of single exhaust plumes up to global-scale numerical models of the atmosphere. His research also benefits from the application of machine learning methods to Earth observation data, such as ongoing work to identify and characterize aircraft condensation trails—and from there quantify their climate impacts—in geostationary satellite imagery. The long-term goal of his work is to enable near real-time integration of observational (monitor, aircraft, and satellite) data into computational models of the environment, supporting unprecedented accuracy and insights with regards to environmental decision making for impact mitigation and environmental justice.
Executive Director, Future Energy Systems Center
Randall Field is the executive director of MITEI’s Future Energy Systems Center. He was previously executive director for the Mobility Systems Center, MITEI’s Low-Carbon Energy Center assessing the impact of emerging transformations in vehicle and fuel technologies, service and business models, policies, demographics, and consumer behavior in the movement of both passengers and goods. He was also the 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.
Technical Intelligence and Integration (Corporate R＆Ds), Technical Advisor, IHI Corporation
Toshiro Fujimori has been engaged in power generation business and technology development of clean, high-efficiency combustion technologies for gas turbine and coal-fired power generation for more than 30 years. As an engineer and project leader, he led the development of oxygen-fired boilers and twin fluidized bed gasifiers for biomass and lignite coal in the field of decarbonization and effective utilization of resources in the energy sector. For ammonia fuel, he was a principal investigator of Strategic Innovation Promotion Project (SIP), Japanese national project from 2014 to 2018 for the development of ammonia combustion technologies of gas turbine and coal cofiring boiler. Currently, he is a technical advisor of IHI on all energy-related technologies. He is a specially appointed professor at Tohoku University, responsible for the operation of IHI and Tohoku University Co-create Research Center of Ammonia Value Chain established this year. He has also served as president of the Combustion Society of Japan since 2021.
Principal Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative
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.
Postdoctoral Associate, MIT Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems
Sijia Geng is a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and an incoming assistant professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The focus of her research is to facilitate the energy transition to renewable resources and ensure an autonomous, reliable, and clean future energy system. Using rigorous mathematical tools from analysis, control, and optimization, she develops theory and computational tools to address the critical challenges as variable renewable resources are integrated into energy systems in large scale. Her most recent research interests include dynamics and control of inverter-based smart grids and optimization of electrified transportation systems. Geng received her PhD in electrical and computer engineering in January 2022 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she also received the MS degrees in mathematics and ECE, both in 2021.
Postdoctoral Associate, MIT Energy Initiative
Edward Graham received his PhD in the field of molecular systems engineering from Imperial College London. He is currently a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Energy Initiative working on carbon capture and direct air capture technologies, and electrochemical approaches for hydrogen and ethylene production. His primary interests include thermodynamics, process modeling and optimization, with application to green processes.
Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering Practice; Director, David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice, MIT
T. Alan Hatton is the Ralph Landau Professor and director of the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He obtained his BSc and MSc degrees in chemical engineering at the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa, and worked at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria for three years before attending the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to obtain his PhD. He is currently faculty lead on Carbon Management in the MIT Energy Initiative Future Energy Systems Center. His research interests have encompassed the self-assembly of surfactants and block copolymers, the synthesis and functionalization of magnetic nanoparticles, and the exploitation of stimuli-responsive materials for chemical and environmental processing applications, with a particular current emphasis on molten oxide materials and electrochemically mediated operations for carbon dioxide capture.
Associate Professor, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering
Asegun Henry started as an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT in 2018, where he directs the Atomistic Simulation & Energy (ASE) Research Group. Prior to MIT, he was an assistant professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech from 2012 to 2018. He holds a BS degree in mechanical engineering from Florida A & M University as well as a MS and PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT. Henry’s primary research is in heat transfer, with an emphasis on understanding the science of energy transport, storage, and conversion at the atomic level, along with the development of new industrial scale energy technologies to mitigate climate change. Henry has made significant advances and contributions to several fields within energy and heat transfer, namely: solar fuels and thermochemistry, phonon transport in disordered materials, phonon transport at interfaces, and he has developed the highest temperature pump on record, which used an all ceramic mechanical pump to pump liquid metal above 1400°C. This technological breakthrough, which is now in the Guinness Book of World Records, has opened the door for new high temperature energy systems concepts, such as methane cracking for CO2 free hydrogen production and a new grid level energy storage approach affectionately known as “Sun in a Box”, that is cheaper than pumped hydro.
Senior Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative
Howard J. Herzog is a senior research engineer at 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) and a US 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.
Co-Director, MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub
Randolph Kirchain is a principal research scientist within the MIT Materials Systems Lab and currently serves as the director of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub. Kirchain’s research focuses on the environmental and economic implications of materials selection. The choice of material can have sweeping implications on any product or system. To address this, Kirchain’s research deals with two broad topic areas: 1) the development of methods to model the cost and impacts of production and construction, using limited design information and 2) the sustainability of current and emerging materials systems.
Deputy Director for Policy, MIT Energy Initiative; George P. Shultz Professor of Energy Economics, MIT Sloan School of Management; Director, MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research
Christopher Knittel is the George P. Shultz Professor of Energy Economics in the MIT Sloan School of Management. 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 the deputy director for policy at MITEI and 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.
Chief Strategy Officer, Hydrogenious LOHC Technologies
Andreas Lehmann is chief strategy officer (CSO) at Hydrogenious LOHC Technologies GmbH and is responsible for company strategy as well as funding management and investor relations. Serving also as CEO of Hydrogenious LOHC Emirates, the regional spearhead of Hydrogenious in the Middle East, he is pushing LOHC-based hydrogen exports from the Arab region forward. Before his time at Hydrogenious, Lehmann received a PhD in engineering at the University of Erlangen Nürnberg and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. After that he was project manager at Mckinsey and Company in their Hydrogen Strategy team in Germany. His motivation is to make green hydrogen fly and contribute to a decarbonized future using Hydrogenious’ LOHC technology as an enabler of the green energy revolution.
William Barton Rogers Career Development Chair of Energy Economics, MIT Sloan School of Management
Jing Li holds the William Barton Rogers Career Development Chair of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2017-2018, Li was a postdoctoral associate of the MIT Energy Initiative. Li’s research interests lie in energy economics and industrial organization, focusing on development and adoption of new technologies. In recent work, Li has studied standardization and location choices in the U.S. electric vehicle charging industry, automaker diesel vehicle emissions control technology, and cost pass-through in E85 retail markets. Li received double BSc degrees in mathematics and economics from MIT in 2011 and her PhD in economics from Harvard in 2017.
Principal Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative
Dharik S. Mallapragada is a principal research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), where his research focuses on developing advanced decision-support tools for planning and operating resilient, low-carbon energy systems as well as design and integration of novel energy technologies. Prior to MIT, Mallapragada spent nearly five years in the energy and petrochemicals industry working on a range of sustainability-focused research topics, including conversion of biomass to fuels and chemicals, low-carbon hydrogen production and developing optimization based tools for energy infrastructure planning, as well as process and product design. Mallapragada’s research contributions include over 25 peer-reviewed publications across a spectrum of journals and development of open-source software such as the GenX model, a tool for planning low-carbon electricity systems. He serves as a member of the Massachusetts Commission on Clean Heat as well as an advisory member on the Open Energy Outlook project. Mallapragada holds a MS and PhD in chemical engineering from Purdue University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India.
Senior Director for Building Decarbonization, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center
Peter McPhee is the senior director for Building Decarbonization at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC), an agency focused on fostering the growth of a vibrant clean energy economy in pursuit of the state’s 2050 net zero emissions obligation. Since 2013, McPhee’s focus has been on establishing low-carbon pathways for the Commonwealth’s buildings. McPhee established MassCEC’s electrification programs and is currently facilitating the technology, policy, and market solutions necessary to support millions of buildings transitioning from fossil fuels to zero emissions technologies in the coming decades.
Deputy Director, MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change; Senior Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative and MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR); Director, MIT Energy-at-Scale Center
Sergey Paltsev is a senior research scientist at MIT Energy Initiative, and a deputy director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA. He is the lead modeler in charge of the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model of the world economy. Paltsev is an author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals and books in the area of energy economics, climate policy, transport, advanced energy technologies, and international trade. Paltsev was a lead author of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is a recipient of the 2012 Pyke Johnson Award (by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, USA, for the best paper in the area of planning and environment).
Arthur D. Little Professor and Department Executive Officer, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering
Kristala L. J. Prather is the Arthur D. Little Professor in and executive officer of the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. Prather received an SB degree from MIT in 1994 and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (1999), and worked four years in BioProcess Research and Development at the Merck Research Labs prior to joining MIT. Prather is the recipient of many awards and has given several named lectures. For more information, please see cheme.mit.edu/profile/kristala-l-jones-prather.
Director, MIT Building Technology Program; Head, Sustainable Design Lab
Christoph Reinhart is a building scientist and architectural educator working in the field of sustainable building design and environmental modeling. At MIT, he is the director of the Building Technology Program and head of the Sustainable Design Lab (SDL), an inter-disciplinary group with a grounding in architecture that develops design workflows, planning tools, and metrics to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings and neighborhoods. He is also a managing member at Solemma, a technology company and Harvard University spinoff, and served as strategic development advisor for MIT spinoff mapdwell until it joined Palmetto Clean Technology in 2021. Planning tools originating from SDL and Solemma are used in practice and education in over 90 countries.
Knowledge Owner, Innovative Technologies for Gas Valorization, Eni
Stefano Rossini holds a degree in industrial chemistry from the University of Milan (1984). He joined Eni group in 1985 where he has spent his technical carrier from researcher to project and unit manager; today he is serving as knowledge owner of Innovative Technologies for Gas Valorization.
Rossini has been the coordinator of the Italian Catalysis Group (2003-2005); he has been member of the Steering Committee of NICE, the Network for Industrial Catalysis in Europe (1999-2004); he has been serving as president of the Lombardia Branch of the Italian Chemical Society (2008-2010) and as president of FAST (Federation of Technical & Scientific Association) after having served as deputy (2010-2013). He has been member of the technical/organizing board of several national and international meetings and congresses. Time to time he teaches short courses/lessons at universities at Master level.
Fields of expertise are heterogeneous catalyst process development, gas valorization technologies and strategy, technical-economical evaluation and deployment of technologies in area of syngas conversion, GHG related technologies (CO2 capture within CCUS frame, methane emission detection).
Master’s Student, MIT Technology and Policy Program
Morgan Santoni-Colvin is a master’s student in the Technology and Policy Program at MIT. He has a Bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, where he previously conducted research on optimal urban planning decisions under the deployment of distributed solar technologies. As a researcher with the MIT Energy Initiative, he studies the electrification of building heating in the United States and the possible systems and policy implications of this transition. He is passionate about the sustainability of the built environment and public policy for the decarbonization of energy systems.
Professor, MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society and MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Noelle Eckley Selin is professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also the Director of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program. Her research uses atmospheric chemistry modeling to inform decision-making on sustainability challenges, including air pollution, climate change, and hazardous substances such as mercury and persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Her work also examines interactions between science and policy in international environmental negotiations and develops systems approaches to address sustainability challenges. She received her PhD from Harvard University in earth and planetary sciences as part of the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group. Her MA (earth and planetary sciences) and BA (environmental science and public policy) are also from Harvard University. Before joining the MIT faculty, she was a research scientist with the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Her articles were selected as the best environmental policy papers in 2015 and 2016 by the journal Environmental Science & Technology. She is the recipient of a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER award (2011), a Leopold Leadership fellow (2013-2014), Kavli fellow (2015), a member of the Global Young Academy (2014-2018), an American Association for the Advancement of Science Leshner Leadership Institute Fellow (2016-2017), and a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow at the Technical University of Munich Institute for Advanced Study (2018-2021).
Graduate Research Assistant, MIT Energy Initiative
Youssef Shaker is an SM candidate in the MIT Technology and Policy program, focusing on the joint decarbonization of power and transportation systems. Prior to MIT, Shaker spent four years at ICF Consulting as part of the Demand-Side Management Analytics team, working on a range of projects for U.S. and international utilities and government entities. These projects explored topics such as ToU tariff design, demand-side management potential studies, energy efficiency program planning, and electrification potential studies. Shaker also worked at Ontario’s Independent Electricity Systems Operator as a market analyst, where he wrote reports on the state of the Ontario wholesale electricity market.
PhD student, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering
Landon Schofield is a PhD student in MIT Chemical Engineering doing his research at the MIT Energy Initiative. His research includes the design and techno-economic optimization of electrochemical systems particularly as a means of decarbonizing chemical manufacturing. Prior to starting at MIT, he worked in engineering consulting for three years as an environmental and process engineer working with clients across a broad range of industries including oil and gas, food manufacturing, and mining.
Deputy Director for Science and Technology, MIT Energy Initiative
Robert Stoner is the deputy director for science and technology at MITEI and founding director of the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design. He is currently a member of the MIT Energy Council, the Science and Technology Committee of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the Technical Advisory Board of the Center for the Study of Science, Technology, and Energy Policy. He is also a member of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Global Commission to End Energy Poverty, and serves as its secretary.
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 energy storage technology and policy, 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 PhD from Brown University in condensed matter physics.
Graduate Student, MIT Department of Chemistry
Bryan Yuk-Wah Tang is a fifth-year graduate student in the Surendranath lab. He attended the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia for undergraduate studies and did research under the tutelage of Professor Chuan Zhao. Tang’s current research focuses of intermediate temperature electrochemistry, with particular interest in electrochemistry under molten hydroxide conditions.
Postdoctoral Associate, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering
Alexandra Tavasoli is a postdoctoral associate in Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research is focused on the industrial ecology surrounding the carbon economy, with a specific eye towards socially equitable and environmentally sustainable resource system design and implementation, as they relate to the sustainability transition of the chemical, materials, and manufactured product life cycle. She has worked in clean technology development for over a decade, and holds degrees in chemical and materials engineering from the University of Toronto, and has won several notable Canadian sustainability industry awards, including being named a Clean50 Emerging Leader and a Top 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leader.
Breene M. Kerr (1951) Professor, MIT Departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering
Bilge Yildiz is the Breene M. Kerr (1951) Professor in the Nuclear Science and Engineering and the Materials Science and Engineering Departments at MIT, where she leads the Laboratory for Electrochemical Interfaces. She received her PhD at MIT in 2003 and her BSc from Hacettepe University in 1999. After working at Argonne National Laboratory as a research scientist, she returned to MIT as an assistant professor in 2007. Yildiz’s research focuses on laying the scientific groundwork to enable next generation electrochemical devices for energy, fuels and chemicals conversion and information processing. The scientific insights derived from her research guide the design of novel materials and interfaces for efficient and durable solid oxide fuel cells, electrolytic water splitting, brain-inspired computing, and solid-state batteries. Her laboratory has made significant contributions in advancing the molecular-level understanding of oxygen reduction, water splitting, ion diffusion, and charge transfer on mixed ionic-electronic conducting oxides in these applications. Her approach combines computational and experimental analyses of electronic structure, defect mobility and composition, using in situ scanning tunneling and X-ray spectroscopy together with first-principles calculations and novel atomistic simulations. Her teaching and research efforts have been recognized by the Argonne Pace Setter (2016), ANS Outstanding Teaching (2008), NSF CAREER (2011), IU-MRS Somiya (2012), the ECS Charles Tobias Young Investigator (2012), the ACerS Ross Coffin Purdy (2018) and the LG Chem Global Innovation Contest (2020) awards, and the American Physical Society fellowship (2021).
Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative
Guiyan Zang is a research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), where her research includes techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle analysis (LCA) on ammonia production and application, clean hydrogen and ethylene production, bio-methanol production, and carbon capture for hard-to-abate industries. Prior to MIT, she spent nearly three years working for Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) as a postdoctoral scholar and then as an energy system analyst. At ANL, her research was energy conversion system design, TEA and LCA, in particular, decarbonization for industrial processes, synthetic fuel/chemicals production, and waste material conversions. She developed the e-fuel pathways in GREET software and earned two Impact Argonne Awards. She holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Iowa.
Edward and Joyce Linde Associate Professor of City and Transportation Planning, MIT; Director, , MIT Mobility Initiative
Jinhua Zhao brings behavioral science and transportation technology together to shape travel behavior, design mobility system, and reform urban policies. He develops methods to sense, predict, nudge, and regulate travel behavior and designs multimodal mobility systems that integrate emerging shared and automated mobility with public transport. He sees transportation as a language to describe a person, characterize a city, and understand an institution and aims to establish the behavioral foundation for transportation systems and policies.
Zhao has founded and directs the MIT Mobility Initiative designed to decarbonize global mobility system to be safe, clean, and inclusive, coalescing research, education, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement on mobility and transportation into a greater whole. He is the Associate Professor of City and Transportation Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Zhao directs the JTL Urban Mobility Lab and Transit Lab at MIT and co-directs the Mobility Systems Center of the MIT Energy Initiative. He has led long-term research programs with transportation authorities and operators worldwide, including London, Chicago, Washington D.C., Hong Kong, and Singapore.