The Sustainability Accelerator at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability has welcomed the first cohort of its new postdoctoral fellowship program for innovators that was announced in spring of 2024. The four fellows will focus on the challenges of removing billions of tons of greenhouse gases from Earth’s atmosphere each year by 2050 as part of the Accelerator’s Greenhouse Gas Removal cohort.

“Though these scientists are still relatively early in their research careers, they represent the future of sustainability and carbon removal strategies. Being named Accelerator Fellows is a recognition that the work they have done to date shows great promise,” said Fortinet Founders Professor Yi Cui, the faculty director of the Sustainability Accelerator and a leading expert in nanotechnologies for next-generation batteries and sustainable materials. “As a mentor, I look forward to working with and guiding them as they pursue and launch creative, scalable, and interdisciplinary solutions to our climate crisis.”

Greenhouse Gas Removal is the first of the Accelerator’s “Flagship Destinations” – targets selected for potential to rapidly apply Stanford research to global sustainability challenges. The Accelerator recently added five new destinations, plus two “cross-cutting platforms” that will help to inform all six targets.

“I could not have hoped for a more promising first class of Sustainability Accelerator Fellows, and I look forward to seeing where their work takes us,” said Jeffrey Brown, managing director of the Greenhouse Gas Removal Flagship Destination. “The solutions they are proposing are inspiring for their innovative approaches to these complex problems, but also for their practical potential to make a significant contribution to real and meaningful reductions in carbon dioxide in the skies and waters.”

One fellow aims to turn agricultural waste into stable carbon that can be stored or used in low-carbon applications. Another will use solar power to convert excess carbon dioxide into valuable, marketable chemicals. A third will work to create a reactor that removes carbon dioxide from the air and seawater. The fourth fellow will work to develop concrete – currently a major source of greenhouse gases – into a carbon-negative commodity.

Each of the fellows will be mentored by Stanford faculty, including Cui, Dean Arun Majumdar, materials scientist Jennifer Dionne, and chemical engineer Thomas Jaramillo, and receive support from Accelerator staff to translate the solutions they generate into successful ventures.

Sustainability Accelerator Fellowship director Audrey Yau noted the inaugural fellows’ breadth of skills and depth of experience. “These four fellows were chosen from a highly competitive pool for the creative approaches they’ve developed to reach aggressive carbon removal targets. We are committed to helping them get established in the entrepreneurial sustainability community so that their solutions can quickly scale from proof of concept to impact at the global scale.”

Meet the Fellows

Alex Al-Zubeidi earned his doctorate in chemistry in 2022 at Rice University. He has developed photo-electrochemical techniques that use renewable-but-intermittent solar energy to convert airborne CO₂ into other valuable chemicals. Similar large-scale technologies produce chemicals that need additional thermal processing that is incompatible with intermittent solar power. In response, Al-Zubeidi has created a smaller, high-turnover electrolyzer that converts CO₂ into industrial ethylene. Al-Zubeidi’s reactor can be rapidly and repeatedly turned on and off based on the intermittent nature of solar energy. Al-Zubeidi will be advised by materials scientist Jennifer Dionne.

Divya Chalise completed his PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2023. He hopes to use chemistry and thermal physics to turn billions of tons of annual agricultural waste – corn husks and stalks, wheat and rice chaff, and other byproducts of farming – into stable, high-carbon biochar for long-term underground storage. Such waste is often burned or merely left to decompose, releasing its CO₂ back into the air. More than a third of net annual CO₂ released in the atmosphere comes from crop waste. But making biochar is not easy or cheap. Chalise hopes to produce biochar at room temperature and bring costs to a more reasonable $10-$50 per ton to scale production to gigatons per year. He will be advised by Arun Majumdar and Yi Cui.

Qi Zheng earned his doctorate in civil and environmental engineering in 2024 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked to create sustainable building materials and to understand the science of cementation through electron microscopy and synchrotron techniques. Cement is the world’s most widely used construction material but produces some 7.5% of total annual CO₂ emissions. Under his Sustainability Accelerator Fellowship, Zheng will work to perfect zero-carbon cement that not only eliminates CO₂ emissions in the cement-making process, but actively sequesters CO₂ from the skies in the cement itself. With further refinements, Zheng’s solution could grow to the gigaton scale. He will be advised by Yi Cui.

Peng Zhu received his PhD in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Rice University in 2023. His research focuses on new nanomaterial and electrochemical approaches for CO2 capture, which are not yet efficient enough to scale to global needs. Zhu has created a more efficient and durable reactor able to continuously capture CO₂ from the air and seawater at high rates. The reactor uses advanced materials to enhance carbon capture processes, putting both sustainability targets and economic viability within reach. Zhu will be advised by chemical engineer Tom Jaramillo.

Calling future fellows

In addition to financial backing in the form of a salary and R&D funds for each fellow, the Sustainability Accelerator will support the fellows’ professional development through research, mentoring, and entrepreneurial coaching from Stanford’s globally recognized network of leaders in law and policy, business, engineering, environmental sciences, and more.

Applications for the 2025 cohort of Sustainability Accelerator Postdoctoral Fellowships across a broad area of six flagship destinations and two platforms will open Oct. 14, 2024, and will close Dec. 31, 2024. Award decisions will be issued in March and the fellows will begin work on campus in June 2025. Interested candidates may learn more about the scope of the next call on the Sustainability Accelerator website, which will be updated with details on Oct. 1.