Maravelias reins it in 

Christos Maravelias’ trick is to turn ideas into equations. Often detailed and complex, those equations in turn optimize industrial systems.

Since arriving at Princeton in 2020, Maravelias has helped turn municipal wastewater into clean fuels, optimize a pharmaceutical supply chain, and speed the energy transition in trucking. 

Deploying important innovations at scale “is never going to require just one component or technology. It’s going to require a system in which that component is only one part,” said Maravelias, the Anderson Family Professor in Energy and the Environment and chair of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. While researchers often focus on scientific questions concerning a single component, he said the bottlenecks that slow innovation often appear in other parts of the process. 

That’s where Maravelias steps in — optimizing tradeoffs, minimizing waste, and reducing environmental impacts. 

Lately, he has been working toward decarbonizing energy-intensive parts of the economy. He is collaborating with industrial giant Siemens to study how food and pharmaceutical production can be electrified. And his collaborations with NEC Labs and Korea’s Posco aim to electrify aspects of steel production, which accounts for around 8% of human-generated carbon emissions annually. 

“What we have seen time and time again is the importance of systems thinking,” Maravelias said. “How studying the entire system, in addition to its components, helps us identify the major technological and economic drivers of new technologies and, ultimately, guide future research.”