Board MemberEmily Carter

Emily Carter is the senior strategic advisor on sustainability science at the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment at Princeton University.

She recently returned to Princeton University from UCLA, where she served as executive vice chancellor and provost and distinguished professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering until the end of 2021. At Princeton, in addition to her reappointment as Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment, she is also once again a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and applied and computational mathematics. After spending the first half of her career on the physical sciences faculty at UCLA, she joined the Princeton Engineering faculty for the second half. She also served as founding director of Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment and then as Princeton’s Dean of Engineering and Applied Science before being recruited back to become UCLA’s second ranking officer. In her new leadership role at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, she aims to diversify the lab’s portfolio into sustainability science, with an emphasis on carbon mitigation broadly defined. Over her career, Carter built a large, multidisciplinary research group continuously supported by various arms of the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation. Her current research, supported by the DOE and the DOD, involves developing and applying quantum mechanical simulation techniques to enable discovery and design of materials for sustainable fuel and chemical production, and carbon dioxide utilization and sequestration. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and the European Academy of Sciences.