environmental sampling

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. Our 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.

Latest

05/2024 Kristen wins Mathworks Fellowship

04/2024 Audrey awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

03/2024 Marc wins presentation award at BASF meeting

03/2024 Nikki featured in NIEHS newsletter

02/2024 Vittorio's paper published in ES&T

12/2023 Nikki wins award for best poster at SRP Annual Meeting

11/2023 Yunpo's paper published in ES&T

11/2023 Yunpo successfully defends his doctoral dissertation

10/2023 Desiree featured in MIT News