The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has appointed Professor Emily Carter, a leader and renowned researcher in the field of sustainable energy to chair a study on how to turn carbon from a climate-changing pollutant into useful commercial products.

The committee, called Carbon Utilization Infrastructure, Markets, Research and Development, is tasked with exploring "regional and national market opportunities as well as infrastructure and research needs" to help the nation stop contributing to the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere. Congress mandated the study in the Energy Act of 2020.

"I could not think of anything more important in altering the course of how our nation and the world combat climate change" than the questions to be addressed in this study, said Carter, a senior strategic advisor for sustainability science at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton's Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment. 

"I am looking forward to leading this three-year study that aims to provide a blueprint for the nation’s investments in markets, infrastructure, and R&D to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to turn it into useful products, displacing our need to pull oil out of the ground while at the same time removing CO2 from the atmosphere to reduce global warming," said Carter, who also is a professor of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics.

Carter joined the Princeton faculty in 2004 and served as founding director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment before becoming dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. From 2019 through 2021, Carter served as executive vice chancellor and provost of the University of California, Los Angeles, before returning to Princeton to focus on research and leadership in environmental sustainability.

Carter's research spans the fields of chemistry, physics, applied mathematics and engineering, particularly at the quantum mechanical level. In recent years, her work has included the discovery and design of materials for generating clean electricity from sunlight and from fuel cells; making fuels and chemicals catalytically from carbon dioxide, water, air, and excess renewable energy; and investigating lightweight metal alloys for fuel-efficient vehicles and fusion reactor walls.

Carter is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as a recipient of numerous major awards.

PPPL, on Princeton University's Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, N.J., is devoted to creating new knowledge about the physics of plasmas — ultra-hot, charged gases — and to developing practical solutions for the creation of fusion energy. The Laboratory is managed by the University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the largest single supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.