Alissa Park: Pioneering Research in Sustainable Energy and Carbon Management at UCLA

Dr. Ah-Hyung (Alissa) Park, the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is a prominent figure in the field of sustainable energy and materials conversion. Her work addresses climate change through innovative research in carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies, as well as atmospheric carbon dioxide removal.

Academic Journey and Early Life

Born in Seoul, South Korea, to Jin Park, an architectural engineer, and Heesup Yoon, an artist, Alissa Park's academic journey began at the University of British Columbia in Canada. There, she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in chemical and biological engineering in 1998 and 2000, respectively. She later completed a Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering in 2005 at the Ohio State University, solidifying her foundation for groundbreaking research.

Expertise in Carbon Transformation

Dr. Park is recognized as a leading expert on the forms that carbon takes in both engineered and natural systems as humans transform them to extract energy or produce materials and fuels. Her research focuses include alternative energy production and sustainable energy conversion pathways, with an emphasis on integrated carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS). She has made multifaceted contributions to various sustainable energy and environmental subjects.

Circular Carbon Economy

Park's group aims to create a New Circular Carbon Economy by capturing and converting greenhouse gas CO2 into platform molecules for current and future fuels, chemicals and polymers, nutrients, and pharmaceuticals needed by humanity in a carbon-neutral, and eventually, carbon-negative manner. Coupling direct air capture CO2 with a hybrid electro-bio catalytic CO2 conversion technology is a truly transformational approach towards negative emission technologies (NETs) that has a great potential to achieve great carbon and energy efficiencies. A cyclic carbon economy was not possible in the past, since it requires cost-effective renewable energy. Our convergent research toward circular carbon engineering aims to integrate DAC, bio- and electro-chemical disciplines to create highly integrated, hybrid reaction systems that can work with intermittent renewable energy.

Liquid-like Nanoparticle Organic Hybrid Materials (NOHMs)

Current efforts include a fundamental understanding of chemical and physical interactions of natural and engineered materials with CO2, such as the development of liquid-like nanoparticle organic hybrid materials (NOHMs). She and her research group designed NOHMs with tailored chemical and physical properties for CO2 capture, and she is currently working on electrochemical reduction of CO2 to chemicals and fuels using NOHMs and renewable energy.

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Sustainable Energy Conversion Pathways

Park’s group is also working on innovative chemical and fuel synthesis pathways using unconventional sources such as marine biomass, while minimizing environmental impacts.

Career Trajectory

Before joining UCLA in 2023, she 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.

Awards and Recognition

She holds several patents and has received numerous professional awards and honors, including the Shell Thomas Baron Award in Fluid-Particle Systems and PSRI Lectureship Award from AIChE PTF and the NSF CAREER Award, among others. She also led key global and national discussions on CCUS, including the Mission Innovation Workshop in 2017. Park is a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), American Chemical Society (ACS), Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Other awards include the C3E Research Award, the 2018 ACS ENFL Emerging Researcher Award, and the 2017 ACS Women's Chemical Committee Rising Star Award.

Advancing Zero-Carbon Emission Goals

Park is a notable figure in advancing science and engineering research toward zero-carbon emission goals, with a focus on women’s involvement in STEM. She was a co-chair of the 2017 Mission Innovation workshop on CCUS and served as a member of the National Academies' committee on CO2 utilization from 2022 to 2025. At Columbia University, she worked with UN Women on entrepreneurship in sustainable energy in developing countries.

Research Focus at UCLA

John R. Park leads a research team that aims to advance the scientific understanding of sustainable energy and materials conversion pathways to address climate change. Her group’s current research focuses on the development of novel nano-scale materials for combined CO2 capture and conversion as well as innovative CO2 utilization and storage options based on unique carbonate chemistry involving silicate minerals while recovering valuable materials such as rare earth elements.

Urban Mining

She is also working on a new concept of urban mining where we recover metals (e.g., copper and gold) and energy from electronic wastes and industrial wastes (e.g., ashes from waste-to-energy plants and slags from steelmaking plants) through green chemistry.

Sustainable Concretes and Construction Materials

Concrete is the most widely used infrastructural material due to its superior mechanical properties and versatility. Unfortunately, concrete and aggregates as well as other construction materials have large environmental footprints including massive CO2 emissions. Furthermore, our infrastructure is rapidly gaining. Park group members develop sustainable concretes and construction materials that exhibit reduced embodied carbon through partial replacement of cement with end-products of carbon sequestration technology, with tailored physical and chemical properties. Our key scientific and engineering questions are focused on the chemically enhanced extraction of alkaline metals (i.e., Ca and Mg) from industrial wastes (i.e., waste concretes and fly ash and bottom ash from power plants) to form solid carbonates, and their use and behavior in concrete as an alternative binder.

Metal Valorization and Carbon Sequestration

To achieve the rapid clean energy transition, there is an urgent need for the sustainable supply of energy-relevant critical minerals and rare earth elements. Valuable energy-critical metals such as platinum group metals (PGMs) and Ni occur in low concentrations in mafic and ultramafic ores with complex mineralogy. PGM concentration, for example, is < 5 ppm (g/ton) disseminated in a large number of mineral phases (there are over 350 minerals that carry PGMs). These ores often contain low, but economically important, concentrations of other energy-critical metals such as Co and Cu. Traditional processing routes for these ores are energy and water intensive and require complex flow sheets and large amounts of diverse chemicals. Even then, a significant number of values end up in tailings because these values are disseminated in waste rock and not liberated; adequate liberation would require further extensive comminution which is both highly impractical and vastly uneconomical. There is thus a long-standing research need for innovative separation and extraction technologies for recovery and purification from both ores and tailings-especially from the latter, which have accumulated in vast ponds for many decades. We envision a paradigm shift in sustainable mining by developing a more energy-efficient, highly integrated, renewable-energy-driven CO2 sequestration and metal recovery technology for ores and especially tailings allowing tandem metal valorization and carbon sequestration. Specifically, our innovative concept aims to develop an autogenous, reactive comminution reactor system using Stirred Media Mills (SMM) that can provide excellent liberation of value minerals from host rock, thereby significantly enhancing their recovery and simultaneously also generate high specific-surface-area Mg/Ca/Fe (or Mg-Ca-Fe) silicate mineral particles for rapid leaching and continuous removal of Si-rich passivation layers on these silicates. In addition, this approach significantly reduces energy consumption in comminution (because the SMM will be operated at low speeds since the objective is not a targeted PSD) and can be coupled with sustainable carbon mineralization, flotation and electrochemical recovery of key energy minerals using selective redox pathways.

Ocean-Based Solutions for Climate Change Mitigation

We work on a number of innovative approaches to develop ocean-based solutions for climate change mitigation. Since oceans constitute the largest natural sink of CO2, technologies that can enhance carbon storage, or even CO2 capture, in the ocean are highly desired. In the Park group, we develop technologies such as alkalinity enhancement and biologically inspired CO2 hydration reactions that can shift the equilibrium of ocean water to pump more carbon into this natural sink. Our approaches provide valuable insights into how we can harvest and convert CO2 captured by the ocean into chemicals, fuels, and materials using renewable energy such as off-shore wind. Through these emerging and innovative technologies, organic and inorganic carbon from ocean-based solutions can replace fossil-derived carbon and create a new carbon economy.

Marine Biomass as Bioenergy Source

Another emerging area of ocean-based solutions is the use of marine biomass as bioenergy source, also known as blue carbon. Seaweed and salt-tolerant algae are among less investigated types of bioenergy sources that is available worldwide, compared to the global oil distribution. They can also be farmed in regions where algal biomass is currently by using brine instead of freshwater. Thermochemical conversion pathways of biomass (e.g., gasification, pyrolysis and liquefaction) are attractive because of rapid reaction kinetics but are challenged by the need for dry feedstock. Seaweeds and algae that have a high-moisture content (80-90%), generally need to be dried before their conversion. In the Park group, we are investigating an alkaline thermal treatment (ATT) reaction, which directly converts wet and salty seaweeds to high purity hydrogen in the presence of hydroxide (i.e., NaOH) and a gas-reforming Ni/ZrO2 catalyst. This particular reaction is less studied but very interesting in terms of its moderate reaction conditions (i.e., ambient pressure and temperature < 500 °C) that would allow the development of distributed biomass conversion systems without the need of a skilled operator. As shown in Figure, the overall ATT reaction is designed to push all the energy towards the H2 product, while the carbon in the seaweed is captured and stored as solid carbonates. If the purity of produced H2 is high enough to eliminate any subsequent gas cleaning steps, the overall biomass conversion technology would have a great potential to be sustainable.

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Overcoming the CO2 Waste "Spill"

For over a century, society has dumped waste CO2 into the atmosphere, oblivious to its damage to the environment. Whereas other waste “spills” are directly remediated (e.g., Gulf Oil Spill of 2010) by concerted actions, widespread dumping of CO2 into the atmosphere remains a staple of modern society.

Engineered Carbon Mineralization

Engineered carbon mineralization is better known as a potential technology for storing CO2 with a great long-term stability. Geologic storage is an important component of global efforts to mitigate emissions and reduce the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Permanent, solid storage of CO2 in inert, non-toxic environmentally benign minerals, via carbon mineralization in mafic and ultramafic rocks, has long been considered as a storage option, in part because by storing it in solid state in subsurface environments, it may reduce the potential cost of monitoring mobile forms of CO2. Mineralization occurs naturally during weathering of Mg- and/or Ca-rich, Al-poor materials (e.g., “ultramafic rocks” composed mainly of the minerals olivine, serpentine, brucite, and/or wollastonite). We are motivated by examples of extensive, natural carbon mineralization that occurs during weathering of ultramafic rocks. Most ultramafic rocks at and near the Earth’s surface are “peridotites” that come from the upper mantle, where the most abundant minerals are Mg-rich olivine (Mg1.8Fe0.2SiO4) and pyroxenes (Ca,Mg,Fe)2Si2O6. Mantle peridotite is brought to the surface by plate tectonics together with faulting and erosion. It is very far from equilibrium with the atmosphere and oceans, and reacts rapidly to form Mg-hydrates (serpentine Mg3Si2O5(OH)4, brucite Mg(OH)2), iron oxides, and carbonates (magnesite MgCO3, dolomite CaMg(CO3)2, calcite CaCO3).

Park Research Group Members

The Park Research Group includes:

Postdocs: Jan. 2024 - presentPh.D. Andrew P.
Postdocs: Jan. 2024 - presentPh.D.
Postdocs: March 2021 - presentPh.D. in Chemical Engineering and Advanced MaterialsNewcastle University, UKCo-advisor: Prof.
Postdocs: July 2024 - presentPh.D.
Postdocs: Sept. 2024 - presentPh.D.
Postdocs: July 2024 - presentPh.D. in Food ScienceUniversity of WisconsinCo-advisor: Prof.
Postdocs: Feb. 2025 - presentPh.D. in Chemical EngineeringIndian Institute of Technology, Delhi, IndiaCo-advisor: Prof.
Postdocs: Oct. 2024 - presentPh.D. in Chemical EngineeringCase Western Reserve UniversityCo-advisor: Prof.
Postdocs: June 2024 - presentPh.D. in Physical ChemistryHuazhong University of Science and Technology, China Co-advisor: Prof.
Ph.D. Xiaoyang Shi (Postdoc: Nov. 2021 - May 2024):
Ph.D. Seokyoon Moon (Postdoc: Nov. 2021 - 02/2023): Ph.D. from School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Engineering, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Gwangju, South Korea.
Hunter B. Vibbert (Postdoc: January 2021 - 2022):
Mengqi Shen (Postdoc: April 2021 - 2023): Ph.D. from Department of Chemistry, Brown University.
Qiaowan Chang (Postdoc: April 2021 - 2023): Ph.D. from Department of NanoEngineering, University of California San Diego.
Jeffrey Xu (Postdoc: April 2021 - 2022):
Dongjae Kim (Postdoc: Nov. 2021 - August 2022): Ph.D. from Department of Chemical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, South Korea.
Andrzej Gladysiak (Postdoc: April 2020 - Feb 2022):
Guanhe Rim (Postdoc: June 2020 - February 2021): Ph.D. from Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia University.
Ph.D. Ming Gao (PhD: 2015 - 2018): Currently a Chief Engineer at GreenOre CleanTech LLC.
Thomas E.

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