To fix the climate in time, we need good research and good returns | Desirée Plata | TEDxBoston

MIT professor and civil engineer Desirée Plata grew up on a Superfund site. Her engineering brain recognized, even at an early age, the connections between toxic environmental factors and poor health outcomes she was seeing across her community. These experiences led her not just to become a leading innovator in material science, but also train the next generation of inventors to factor in environmental impacts. She keenly recognizes the power of aligning incentives of research with financial return to reach our climate goals in a meaningful timeframe. She's charting an unconventional path through academia, by expediting commercial opportunities of lab discoveries and spinning out startups that have the potential to make the best environmental solutions the best investments. Desirée Plata’s research seeks to maximize technology’s benefit to society while minimizing environmental impacts in industrially important practices through the use of geochemical tools and chemical mechanistic insights. A central tenant of Plata's work for over a decade has been that academic researchers in environmental science should be partnering with industry to solve important environmental challenges. She is a co-founder of two climate and energy related startups: Nth Cycle and Moxair.

Plata earned her doctoral degree in Chemical Oceanography and Environmental Chemistry from the MIT and the WHOI’s Joint Program in Oceanography (2009). She previously served as Assistant Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Yale University and Associate Director for Research at the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale. Plata is now Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT and director of the MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx