“CCUS technologies will remain very important for our sustainable future. There is an international consensus that CCUS is needed to address climate change, which is a very critical issue.”
-Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park, Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean and Professor, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, UCLA Samueli School Of Engineering
Before joining UCLA in 2023, Alissa was the Lenfest Earth Institute Professor of Climate Change at Columbia University, where she also served as the Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy. Her research focuses on sustainable energy and materials conversion pathways with an emphasis on integrated Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) technologies. Park received many professional awards and honors, including the Shell Thomas Baron Award in Fluid-Particle Systems and PSRI Lectureship Award from AIChE PTF, US C3E Research Award, and NSF CAREER Award. She also led key global and national discussions on CCUS, including the Mission Innovation Workshop in 2017. Park is a Fellow of AIChE, ACS, CIFAR, RSC and AAAS. She holds degrees from The Ohio State University (PhD, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) and the University of British Columbia (BASc and MASc, Chemical and Biological Engineering).
How did you become interested in this field?
When I was doing my undergraduate and master’s degree at UBC, I was much more interested in the physical phenomena of multiphase reactors and particle technology. I was working on designing fluidized bed reactors and I thought I would study a similar topic for my PhD.
When I entered my PhD program, however, I had an advisor who was using particle technology in new application areas, one of which was carbon capture and storage. My advisor suggested that if I intended to become an academic faculty member and do research for the rest of my life, I should tackle a “grand challenge”.
He believed that studying something related to emissions, especially carbon emissions from the power sector, was a field that needed a lot of new innovations and creativity.
So he gave me several papers one day and said, “Come up with something new and innovative! Dream big!”
With his strong mentorship, I was able to start with a grand challenge that I wanted to tackle and then narrow it down to the first scientific question that I wanted to ask.
The short answer is I had an amazing advisor. And now I try to do the same for my PhD students and postdocs.