Plata Lab: Environmental Sustainability

 The Plata Lab at MIT seeks to change the approach to innovation globally, where engineered solutions of the future will incorporate environmental objectives, along with traditional performance and cost metrics, early in the design process to ensure sustainable technologies that serve society. We emphasize technologies and strategies that are readily adoptable and deployable to maximize real-world impact of our work.

Using tools derived from environmental organic and inorganic chemistry, we probe and predict environmental impacts associated with industrially relevant materials and processes. An important component of this work is building novel experimental devices to simulate industrial or environmental processes, as well as utilizing advances in computation to increase the throughput of our work. Ultimately, we seek to inform prediction of environmental fate (transport and transformation) of industrially important chemicals, elucidate guiding principles for environmental compatibility, and aid the design of more benign technologies. Interests span from nano materials synthesis and use in environmental applications, to heterogeneous catalysis, to fossil energy extraction processes, and the fate of industrial chemicals and materials in the environment.