Nina Z. Janković, Ph.D. Email & Phone Number

Environmental sustainability requires interdisciplinary efforts. Overcoming technological challenges to sustainable technologies necessitates inputs across fields (e.g., from environmental scientists and materials researchers) in a concerted manner. Simultaneously, the design constraints for all innovators must include environmental performance metrics together with the traditional functional performance and cost metrics to prevent future environmental damage. The synergistic benefits of coordinated research and global innovation reform poise novel technologies for economic and environmental sustainability –minimizing environmental impacts, while maximizing the benefit to society. Technologies with market longevity will be environmentally sustainable by design. Over the course of my Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering at Yale University and MIT in the Plata Laboratory of Innovation for Environmental Stability, my research aimed to elucidate design rules for the sustainable development of emerging nanomaterials at cost and scale through fundamental insights from heterogeneous catalysis. My work incorporated environmental objectives to inform the design of more benign novel materials and technologies for sustainable engineered solutions to challenges in climate, water, and energy in a world of finite resources. Ultimately, serving as an example of the alignment and convergence of environmental objectives with functional performance to implement “best chemistries” at scale.It is high time we design benign, safe, and sustainable industrially relevant chemicals, materials, technologies, and processes –globally. SummaryTeams should be greater than the sum of their parts. Led and collaborated with several teams on multi-disciplinary projects over 10+ years research experience across science and engineering fields spanning from structural biology to nanomaterial synthesis at top-tier institutions (The Rockefeller University/HHMI, Yale University, MIT). Recognized academic researcher, as demonstrated by (1) cited publications in high impact peer-reviewed scientific journals, such as, Environmental Science: Nano, Nature Nanotechnology, Green Chemistry, and PNAS, and (2) prestigious graduate fellowship award (2016 NSF-GRFP fellow).