ETI

People Type: Scholars

  • Chibueze Amanchukwu

    Chibueze Amanchukwu

    Chibueze Amanchukwu is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and holds a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory.

    His research is focused on enabling long duration electrical (batteries) and chemical energy storage for a sustainable energy future. His team is especially interested in modifying electrolyte and ion solvation behavior to control electrochemical processes occurring in batteries and electrocatalytic transformations such as carbon dioxide capture and conversion. They couple data science, computation, synthesis, and characterization to holistically understand ion transport in electrolytes and control interfacial reactions for efficient and cheap long duration storage.

    His work has been recognized with the NSF CAREER Award, DOE Early Career Award, ECS-Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar Award, and the 3M Nontenured Faculty Award. He obtained his PhD in chemical engineering as a NDSEG Fellow at MIT and was a TomKat Center Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University.

    Interested in joining the Amanchukwu Lab?

    The Amanchukwu Lab is actively recruiting graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and undergraduates to join us on the quest for designing and understanding next generation electrolytes for batteries and catalysis. You can expect to push boundaries in chemical synthesis, in-situ characterization tools, and electrochemistry. Learn more by visiting the lab page.

  • Nadya Mason

    Nadya Mason

    Nadya Mason is the dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago and the Robert J. Zimmer Professor of Molecular Engineering. She also serves as the Interim Vice President for Science, Innovation, and Partnerships. She specializes in experimental studies of quantum materials, with a research focus on the electronic properties of nanoscale and correlated systems, such as nano-scale wires, atomically thin membranes, and nanostructured superconductors. Her research is relevant to applications involving nanoscale and quantum computing elements.

    Before becoming dean of PME, Mason was the Rosalyn S. Yalow Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she directed the Illinois Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and also served as founding director of the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (I-MRSEC).

    In addition to maintaining a rigorous research program and teaching, Mason works to increase diversity in the physical sciences, particularly through mentoring, and is former chair of the APS Committee on Minorities, where she helped initiate the “National Mentoring Community.” Mason can also be seen promoting science on local TV, at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, and in a TED talk on “Scientific Curiosity.”

    Mason received her Bachelor of Science from Harvard University and her doctorate from Stanford University, both in physics. Among her many honors, she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been recognized for her work with awards, including the 2024 Robert Holland Jr. Award, the 2019 APS Bouchet Award, 2012 APS Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, and the 2009 Denise Denton Emerging Leader Award.

  • Y. Shirley Meng

    Y. Shirley Meng

    Y. Shirley Meng is a professor of molecular engineering at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. She also serves as the founding faculty director of the Energy Technologies initiative at the Institute for Climate and Growth at the University of Chicago, as well as the chief scientist of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) Argonne National Laboratory and director of the Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA).

    Her work pioneers in discovering and designing better materials for energy storage by a unique combination of first-principles computation guided materials discovery and design, and advanced characterization with electron/neutron/photon sources. Meng is the principal investigator of the research group – Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC). She has received several prestigious awards, including the Faraday Medal of Royal Chemistry Society (2020), International Battery Association Battery IBA Research Award (2019), Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists Finalist (2018), C.W. Tobias Young Investigator Award of the Electrochemical Society (2016), Science Award Electrochemistry by BASF and Volkswagen (2014) and NSF CAREER Award (2011). Meng is the elected fellow of Electrochemical Society (FECS) and elected fellow of Materials Research Society (FMRS). She serves as the editor-in-chief for Materials Research Society MRS Energy & Sustainability Journal.

    Meng received her PhD in Advanced Materials for Micro & Nano Systems from the Singapore-MIT Alliance in 2005, and her bachelor’s degree with first-class honor from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2000. She worked as a postdoctoral research fellow and became a research scientist at MIT from 2005-2007. Meng was the Zable Endowed Chair Professor in Energy Technologies at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) before joining PME at the University of Chicago.

  • David Keith

    David Keith

    David Keith has worked near the interface of climate science, energy technology, and public policy since 1990. He took first prize in Canada’s national physics prize exam, won MIT’s prize for excellence in experimental physics, and was one of TIME Magazine’s Heroes of the Environment. Keith is Professor of Geophysical Sciences and founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago.

    Best known for his work on the science, technology, and public policy of solar geoengineering, Keith led the development of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program before moving to Chicago in 2023. His policy work has ranged from analysis of electricity markets and carbon prices to research on public and expert perceptions of risky technologies. Keith’s hardware work includes the first interferometer for atoms, a high-accuracy infrared spectrometer for NASA’s ER-2, the development of an air contactor, and the development of a stratospheric propelled balloon experiment for solar geoengineering.

    Keith founded Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company developing technology to capture CO2 from ambient air. He teaches science and technology policy, climate science, and solar geoengineering. He has reached more than 150,000 students worldwide with an edX energy course and has authored more than 200 academic publications with a total citation count of more than 20,000. Keith has written for the public through numerous opinion pieces and wrote the book A Case for Climate Engineering.

  • Konan Hara

    Konan Hara

    Konan Hara is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and EPIC. He is interested in addressing policy-relevant issues with a focus on applied microeconomics. His main research fields are energy and environmental economics, industrial organization, econometrics, and health economics. Konan earned a PhD in Economics from the University of Arizona in 2024. He received a BA in Medicine, an MD, and a PhD in Public Health from the University of Tokyo.

  • Andy Hultgren

    Andy Hultgren

    Andy Hultgren is an environmental and IO economist with research interests in firm behavior under regulatory uncertainty and in quantifying the economic impacts of climate change. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago (Department of Economics and EPIC) and a member of the Climate Impact Lab. His doctoral studies were at UC Berkeley in Agricultural and Resource Economics, where he was a fellow in the Global Policy Lab and an NSF Data Sciences for the 21st Century fellow. He also hold a Master’s in public policy from UC Berkeley, and a BSE in chemical engineering from Princeton University.

    Before his doctoral studies, Hultgren provided climate change analysis services for several federal agency regulatory proceedings and advised numerous local governments and private businesses on approaches to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Along with his wife and two kids, he also spent two years in the Argentine Patagonia studying sustainable construction techniques.

    Research: My job market paper estimates how firms respond strategically under uncertainty to the threat of future regulation. Firms facing potential future regulation of one of their products must trade off investments in innovation of substitutes against investments in lobbying over regulation. Firm strategic responses are driven by their market power, degree of perceived competitive advantage, and pre-existing capacities for innovation and lobbying. To estimate the model, I scrape approximately 10,000 publications to construct a novel dataset of initial discoveries of previously unknown product harms, which I leverage as a source of exogenous variation to firm information sets.

    I also have several projects seeking to estimate the impacts of climate change on human society, including impacts to agricultural productivity (lead author), human mortality, labor supply, and energy consumption; and how to integrate these impacts into a combined estimate of the social cost of carbon (all with the Climate Impact Lab). A separate project seeks to estimate how agricultural land use responds to climatic changes, asking whether and to what extent cropped areas will “migrate” as the climate changes.

    Fields of Interests:  Environmental and resource economics, industrial organization

  • Anant Sudarshan

    Anant Sudarshan

    Anant Sudarshan is a faculty member at the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick and a Non-Resident Visiting Scholar at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC). Before joining the University of Warwick, Anant was the South-Asia Director of EPIC and taught at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Anant received my PhD in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University and holds undergraduate and masters degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi) and Stanford University respectively. Anant’s research spans several aspects of energy and environment policy including the design of environmental regulation, reducing air-pollution, climate change, energy efficiency, electricity access, and renewable energy policy.

  • Steve Cicala

    Steve Cicala

    Steve Cicala is a non-resident scholar at EPIC and an associate professor of economics at Tufts University. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His work focuses on the economics of regulation, particularly with respect to environmental and energy policy.

    Cicala was previously an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He received an AB in economics and political science from the University of Chicago and a PhD in economics from Harvard University. Following receipt of his undergraduate degree, he spent two years as a research associate at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory.

     

  • Dali Yang

    Dali Yang

    Dali L. Yang participated in China’s Pollution: The Costs, Challenges, and Steps Forward. They are otherwise unassociated with EPIC.

    Dali L. Yang is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the founding Faculty Director of the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, a university-wide initiative to promote collaboration and exchange between UChicago scholars and students and their Chinese counterparts.

    Professor Yang has previously served in a number of other academic leadership roles. He was Chairman of the Political Science Department, Director of The Center for East Asian Studies, and Director of the Committee on International Relations of the University of Chicago. He also previously served as Director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore and Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Chicago.

    Professor Yang is a member of the Committee of 100, a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a member of the China Committee of the Chicago Sister Cities International Program. He is also on the Advisory Board of the Paulson Institute at the University of Chicago. He is a frequent public speaker and has been a member and contributor to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs report The United States and the Rise of China and India (2006). Professor Yang has served on the editorial boards of leading journals in political science and China studies. He has been a co-director of the University of Chicago Workshop on East Asia: Politics, Economy and Society.

    Professor Yang’s current research is focused on the politics of China’s development, particularly risk regulation and governance, and state-society relations. Among his books are Remaking the Chinese Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China (Stanford University Press, 2004); Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine (Stanford University Press, 1996); and Beyond Beijing: Liberalization and the Regions in China (Routledge, 1997). He is also editor or co-editor of several other volumes, most recently The Global Recession and China’s Political Economy (Palgrave, 2012). A contributor to The United States and the Rise of China and India, by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, his recent articles have appeared in the International Political Science Review, Journal of Contemporary China, and Political Studies.

    An engineering graduate from Beijing Science and Technology University, Yang received his Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University. He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1992.

  • Kim Wolske

    Kim Wolske

    Kim Wolske is a research associate professor in the Harris School of Public Policy. Her work draws on the fields of environmental, social, and cognitive psychology to examine the behavioral dimensions of energy issues, with an eye toward improving the design of public-facing policies and programs. Most recently she collaborated with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as part of the Department of Energy’s Sunshot Initiative to investigate strategies for lowering the soft costs of residential rooftop solar. Other research explores how different ways of framing climate change solutions may influence public perceptions of the issue and support for mitigation and adaptation policies.

    Dr. Wolske previously worked as a researcher with the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise and as an independent consultant to Opower. She received a BA in environmental studies from Connecticut College, an MS in natural resource policy and behavior from the School of Natural Resources & Environment at the University of Michigan, and a PhD in environmental psychology, also from the University of Michigan.