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Like many researchers, Desirée Plata often finds herself mulling things over at night. But what keeps her up isn’t usually anxiety about publishing her next paper or winning her next grant. Instead, she worries about people like her aunt, who struggled because of a lack of access to clean air and water.
Plata’s aunt died at age 44 from breast cancer that was likely linked to toxic chemical exposure. That loss was one of many events that forged Plata’s winding career path from chemistry to engineering.
Plata is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and codirector of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. She designs novel materials to tackle challenging environmental problems and has cofounded two climate- and energy-related start-ups: Boston-based Moxair, which destroys methane emissions from coal mines and dairy farms; and Burlington, Massachusetts–based Nth Cycle, which recovers critical metals from electronic waste and industrial scrap.
“My main motivator, and what I envision for the future, is trying to make our chemical processes and industries compatible with human and ecological health,” she says.
Plata’s first brush with the incompatibility between industry and environment came at age 8, when she noticed rampant illness in her grandmother’s hometown of Gray, Maine. Her grandmother and uncle had multiple sclerosis, and “it seemed like in every other house there was cancer or a neurological disease of some sort,” Plata says. “I said to my mom, ‘I think it’s something in the water or air.’”
Turns out she was right. Her family wasn’t aware that the US Environmental Protection Agency had determined that improper disposal of trichloroethylene and other hazardous chemicals at a disposal site in Gray had contaminated the groundwater. The EPA declared it a Superfund site, the agency’s designation for a site with hazardous material contamination.
Curious about chemistry and eager to make a difference, Plata honed her research skills as an undergraduate at Union College under the mentorship of 2024 ACS president Mary Carroll. Her aunt’s cancer diagnosis came during her senior year. When it was time to pick a PhD program, Plata wanted to apply her chemistry know-how directly to the environment.
The doctoral program in chemical oceanography and environmental chemistry offered jointly by MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) was a natural fit. The program combines some of the world’s best technological minds with deep expertise on and access to the ocean, Plata says. “You have the physical and intellectual resources of both institutions. It’s like being a kid in a candy store.”
The applicability of her studies was immediately apparent. In spring 2003, about 6 months before Plata began the program, a barge struck bedrock in Buzzards Bay, just under the elbow of Cape Cod, spilling over 370,000 liters of fuel, damaging habitats, and killing thousands of animals and birds. “I immediately stepped into action, collecting oiled rocks and studying how the photochemistry was impacting the removal of hydrocarbon compounds in that complex mixture,” Plata says.
Part of her research led to a change in legislation concerning oil transport along the Massachusetts coast: ships passing through the bay are now required to have a double hull.
But Plata’s work took a major pivot in her third year. She recalls analyzing oil-covered rocks in a WHOI laboratory when she got a call from her aunt, whose cancer was worsening. “I sat down and thought, ‘I have to do something else.’ Nothing I was doing was going to keep toxic chemicals from getting into the environment or prevent anyone from getting sick.”
Plata wanted to work on emerging technologies that prevent or remedy environmental problems and to incorporate green principles into the design of these technologies. “I went to MIT and started knocking on doors in electrical engineering, computer science, and material science and asking, ‘What are you making, and how can I help you make it better?’”
Nanomaterials drew her in, and Plata soon found herself working on improving carbon nanotube synthesis. Her goal was to reduce the environmental impact of these materials while enabling their beneficial applications.
Making nanotubes using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) produces complex gaseous mixtures containing traces of aromatic hydrocarbons—much like the oil mixtures Plata had been analyzing using various chromatography and spectrometry techniques. Turning her trace analysis lens to the CVD gases gave her insight into how nanotubes were forming so she could improve the process.
“My oceanography skill set helped me see the unseeable inside their reactors,” Plata says. “We used that to get dramatic improvements in yields and efficiencies, and large reductions in energy consumption and better control of the product.” She has since tailored the properties of carbon nanotubes and used them in membranes to remove pollutants and extract valuable metals from waste electronics.
After getting her PhD, Plata held faculty positions at Mount Holyoke College, Duke University, and Yale University before returning to MIT in 2018 as a professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Her research now encompasses carbon-based materials, materials design, environmental technologies, and oil and gas development. “The theme that connects most of my work is carbon-based transformation” and using precision analytical chemistry to watch molecules react and transform, Plata says.
But her background in ocean science and her personal experiences have given Plata the ability to zoom out from the details and look at the big picture. One key lesson from her doctoral research guides her to this day, she says, and she instills it in her students: fundamental chemistry knowledge should inform the design of technologies that perform better than today’s versions but are also environmentally compatible and cost-effective.
“That’s almost universally true,” Plata says. “The environmentally benign approach should be saving you cost, unless you’re doing it wrong. I tell my students, ‘If it’s not also cheaper, we haven’t found the right solution yet.’”
Plata doesn’t think of herself as an entrepreneur but recognizes that for a technology to have an impact, launching a business is the best route. “We’re in the midst of an enormous technological and technoeconomic transition,” she says. “We need to change the way we generate energy and make materials, and we need to emphasize Earth compatibility. We’re in a time of urgent need for solutions.”
This pragmatic thinking is key to the success of her start-ups.
In 2017, while at Duke, Plata cofounded Nth Cycle with PhD student Megan O’Connor and Harvard professor Chad Vecitis. The company uses carbon nanotube membranes to extract cobalt and nickel from waste batteries and electronics.
The reliance of traditional metal recovery methods on high temperatures and acid-base chemistry means those approaches have a large environmental footprint, Plata says. Nth Cycle’s low-cost process uses salt water and electrochemistry to separate metals from mixtures. The firm’s reactor system, called the Oyster, “looks like a coat hanger with a bunch of blocks hung in a row,” she says. “Each block is a filter operating at an electrochemical potential, selectively removing the materials of interest.” Nth Cycle launched a commercial facility in September after raising $44 million in venture capital.
Plata’s full attention is now focused on her second start-up, Moxair, which she launched in 2023. The firm is commercializing technology to catalytically destroy low-level emissions of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. The underlying materials are a nod to Plata’s oceanography background: zeolite clays doped with copper, inspired by the copper-containing enzymes that deep-sea bacteria use to oxidize methane.
After successfully testing a prototype at a dairy last year—livestock digestive processes and manure storage produce around 32% of global methane emissions—Plata was contacted by dairy farmers worldwide. Moxair plans to test larger systems at a dairy farm and a coal mine this year. “We use Earth-abundant materials that are relatively low cost, and that’s what lets it be adoptable by industry and not met with supply chain limitations,” Plata says. “What we’re working on right now is how to get trains full of these materials.”
The technology’s impact could be enormous, she says. “If we could apply technology like this to about half of the world’s anthropogenic methane sources, we could save 0.5° C of global climate warming by 2100. That’s a big deal.”
Ask Plata what she is most proud of, though, and her answer comes quickly. “Hands down, it’s my students. As professors, we produce papers and patents, but people are the most important thing we produce. The faculty of the world are training the next generation of researchers. There’s a perception right now that AI is going to solve all of our problems, but it cannot without good physical science information. We need a trained workforce. We need patient chemists who want to solve important problems.”
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