Jessika Trancik

Associate Professor, Energy Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jessika Trancik is an Associate Professor of Energy Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She received her BS in materials science and engineering from Cornell University and her PhD in materials science from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Before MIT, she spent several years at the Santa Fe Institute as an Omidyar Fellow, and at Columbia University as an Earth Institute Fellow, where her research focused on energy systems modeling. Her research group studies the dynamic costs and environmental impacts of energy technologies to inform technology design and policy.

Prof. Trancik’s research centers on evaluating the environmental impacts and costs of energy technologies, and setting design targets to help accelerate the development of these technologies in the laboratory. This work involves assembling and analyzing expansive datasets, and developing new quantitative models and theory. Projects focus on electricity and transportation, with an emphasis on solar energy conversion and storage technologies.