Penn Climate Seminar: Karen Goldberg
Join Penn Climate for a discussion by Karen Golberg titled “Developing Alternatives to Oil as Feedstocks for our Chemicals and Liquid Fuels”
Penn Climate is excited to welcome Karen Goldberg, Vagelos Professor in Energy Research and Chemistry, and the inaugural Director of the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, to kick off our spring seminar series. She will discuss “Developing Alternatives to Oil as Feedstocks for our Chemicals and Liquid Fuels,” exploring why the challenge of decarbonization extends far beyond energy production itself.
It is widely accepted that decarbonization of our energy systems will have the largest impact on mitigation of climate change. But, with a move away from oil as a primary energy source, we will need to develop other sustainable sources for our liquid fuels, and we will also need to reinvent our chemical industry and economy. Gasoline and other liquid fuels are the major products that are made from oil, but oil is also the source of most of the chemicals that are used to make all the consumer goods that we have come to rely on. Our medicines, body-care products, detergents, paints, plastics, fibers, fabrics, and essentially everything we use everyday are currently derived from petroleum. Petroleum has provided the carbon-based building blocks used to make all these consumer goods, all of which are available in sufficient supply and at low cost due to the economy of scale of the enormous oil refining industry. Fundamentally new pathways, from new sources, to these chemicals and liquid fuels that we depend on must be developed to successfully transition to a sustainable future. In this presentation, Karen Goldberg will describe how we arrived at our current energy landscape, projections on where we are going, and present some of the exciting strategies that scientists are pursuing to allow us to use natural gas, carbon dioxide and even waste plastic to prepare our chemicals and fuels in the future.
Karen Goldberg is the Vagelos Professor in Energy Research and Chemistry, and the inaugural Director of the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). She earned her A.B. in chemistry from Barnard College and her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. Following postdoctoral study at The Ohio State University, Goldberg joined the faculty at Illinois State University, a primarily undergraduate institution, and then in 1995, moved to the University of Washington in Seattle. From 2007-2017, she served as Director of the first NSF Phase II Center for Chemical Innovation, the Center for Enabling New Technologies through Catalysis (CENTC). In 2017, she moved to her current position at Penn.
Goldberg is best known for her work developing mechanistic understanding of fundamental organometallic reactions and for application of that knowledge to the creation and optimization of new catalytic systems. Goldberg is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and of the American Chemical Society (ACS). She received the ACS Award for Organometallic Chemistry in 2016 and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. More than 85 graduate students and postdoctoral research associates and over 75 undergraduate students have trained in her laboratories.
