Valerie Karplus
Carnegie Mellon University, PA·Engineering
Factories that make cement, chemicals and plastics, and iron and steel produce a large share of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. The whole industrial sector accounts for about one-third of global emissions.
- Fields
Engineering
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
industrial decarbonization
greenhouse gas emissions
climate change mitigation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Build a global 'dataverse', a shared dataset of plant- and process-level information on greenhouse gas emissions from cement, chemicals and plastics, and iron and steel production in China, Germany, South Africa, and the United States.
- Apply machine learning techniques to identify what drives greenhouse gas emissions at individual industrial plants and processes across diverse global settings.
- Develop approaches for evaluating plant- and region-specific decarbonization options that weigh technical feasibility, economic cost, and impacts on workers and communities.
- Compare regional approaches to industrial decarbonization through international case studies, to learn how investments can be customized or scaled for particular countries, regions, and plants.
More about the research
Cutting these emissions is hard for three reasons. These processes burn fossil fuels for high-temperature heat. Changing them could cost jobs in communities that depend on energy industries. And because much industrial output is traded across borders, strict climate rules in one country can push production to less regulated places. This work asks how industrial supply chains can be deeply decarbonized while limiting harm to workers and communities.
Why it matters
Heavy industry is one of the hardest parts of the economy to decarbonize. Plant-level data and analysis across four major industrial nations could help governments and companies choose emissions cuts that fit local conditions. It could also inform policies that protect energy-sector workers and vulnerable communities during a clean energy transition, and help avoid simply moving polluting production to less regulated countries.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Scot Miller
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Quantify how human-caused methane emissions across the United States, Canada and Mexico changed from 2007 to 2026, combining aircraft, tower and satellite observations with inverse modeling that infers emissions from measured concentrations.
Mark Shiflett
University of Kansas, KS·Engineering
Develop separation, conversion and reuse technologies that recover hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerant blends instead of venting them, so waste refrigerant can be recycled.
Robert Johnson
University of Notre Dame, IN·Social Science
Model how occasionally binding capacity limits in supply chains shift domestic and import price Phillips Curves and fuel inflation, using a multisector open-economy New Keynesian model.
The school
Carnegie Mellon University: 28 labs on PI Pages, $505M a year on research, 346 research doctorates a year.
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