New Faculty Spotlight: Matthew J. Eckelman

Matthew J. Eckelman joined the Department in January 2012 as an Assistant Professor. An environmental engineer with cross-disciplinary training in the area of sustainable resource engineering and the urban environment, Dr. Eckelman's research uses modeling tools to evaluate the life cycle effects of new materials, technologies, and policies on the environment and human health. He earned a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics at Amherst College in 2000, and a M.S. and M.Phil. in Environmental Engineering at Yale University in 2006. Dr. Eckelman completed his Ph.D. at Yale University in 2009. His dissertation, Modeling Environmental Impacts of Complex Material Systems, evaluated the environmental impacts of several technologically important metals. These studies were aimed at various scales, from nano to global, and demonstrated a large degree of geographic variability of environmental impacts. Considering production aspects, he conducted an assessment of every major facility in the global production chain of nickel that showed that energy use and greenhouse gas emissions at these facilities vary over several orders of magnitude. This finding was a much larger range than was previously thought and has serious financial implications for the industry and all of its downstream users under a global regime for carbon management. Dr. Eckelman is currently completing his postdoctoral work at the Yale University Center for Green Chemistry & Green Engineering in the Center for Industrial Ecology. This research focused on extending his work on emission models using stochastic techniques to estimate the location, quantity, and impacts of future metal emissions. He also collaborated on several projects related to new biofuels and bioproducts. Similar to his metals work, he used life cycle assessment to characterize the entire production chain of algal biodiesel, while describing the system-wide environmental impacts of prediction. The use of life cycle assessment allowed a description of the inter-linkages among different environmental issues, for example between water reuse and decreased energy required for pumping, which informs future technological development.

Related Faculty: Matthew J. Eckelman

Related Departments:Civil & Environmental Engineering