Dr. Emily Carter
Dudukovic Lecturer
Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University

Electromanufacturing for a Sustainable Future
Climate change is here, faster than most of us expected, with its attendant extraordinary increases in intensity and frequency of wildfires, droughts, flooding, and more. For nearly two decades, I have been working on strategically chosen activities that I hope will help ultimately reverse global warming and its disastrous effects. These activities include those I will focus on in this lecture, namely, fundamental research to understand how best to convert water and carbon dioxide into chemicals and minerals, and ammonia synthesis and decomposition for fertilizer production and hydrogen storage, transport, and use. I will discuss selected recent results from our multi-level simulations that furnish accurate energetics, kinetics, and insights into these processes via electrically driven catalysis, where the electricity drives thermal, photochemical, or electrolytic reactions. The methods are all based on quantum mechanics, encompassing standard density functional theory (DFT) as a starting point, my group's embedded correlated wavefunction (ECW) theory (necessary to properly describe certain intermediates, excited states, and electron transfer), and multiphysics/multiscale kinetics and dynamics simulations of ammonia synthesis and decomposition (to form hydrogen), and carbon dioxide conversion to fuels and carbonates.
 

Bio:   Emily A. Carter is a world-renowned scholar (Princeton University’s Inaugural Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment) and visionary administrative leader (formerly Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment Founding Director, Princeton’s Dean of Engineering and Applied Science, UCLA’s Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, and now Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s Senior Strategic Advisor and Associate Laboratory Director for Applied Materials and Sustainability Sciences) with a career spanning chemistry, materials science, mechanical and aerospace engineering, and applied and computational mathematics on the faculties of UCLA and Princeton.  She pioneered development and application of quantum simulation techniques enabling design of molecules and materials for sustainable energy and carbon mitigation. She has co-authored nearly 500 publications, patents, and codes; mentored nearly 100 postdoctoral fellows and Ph.D. students; and delivered over 600 invited, keynote, and plenary lectures worldwide.  Her many honors include election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, U.S. National Academy of Inventors, U.S. National Academy of Engineering, European Academy of Sciences, and as Foreign Member of Great Britain’s Royal Society. She strategically lends her expertise to various entities, from the U.S. National Academies (e.g., chairing a three-year Congressionally mandated study on carbon utilization) to private science foundations (launching the Simons Foundation initiative on solar radiation management science and serving on the Kavli Foundation’s board of directors) to the federal government (member of multiple national laboratory advisory and review boards) to advising companies (e.g., chairing a scientific advisory board for a direct ocean capture startup company). She earned her B.S. in Chemistry at UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at Caltech, followed by a brief postdoc at the University of Colorado, Boulder.