Elsa Olivetti
Strategic Advisor, MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium; Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor of Engineering, Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Mission Director, MIT Climate Project
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Elsa Olivetti is the strategic advisor of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium, the mission director, MIT Climate Project, and the Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor of Engineering in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) at MIT. She serves as the lead principal investigator at MIT for REMADE: the Institute for Reducing Embodied-energy and Decreasing Emissions, within the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL).
Her research centers on improving the environmental and economic sustainability of materials in the context of growing global demand. Her interests span three levels of materials production: operational-level, industrial network-level and market-level strategies. She is focused on two areas with the potential for significant environmental benefits: improving the sustainability of materials through increased use of recycled and renewable materials, recycling-friendly material design, and intelligent waste disposition; and understanding the implications of substitution, dematerialization, and waste mining on materials markets. Olivetti earned a BS in engineering science from the University of Virginia and a PhD in materials science and engineering from MIT.
Selected Publications
- Mahjoubi, S., Venugopal, V., Manav, I. B., AzariJafari, H., Kirchain, R. E., & Olivetti, E. A. (2025). Data-driven material screening of secondary and natural cementitious precursors. Communications Materials, 6, Article 99.
- Duan, Y., Tian, Y., Ghosh, S., Goodwin, R., Venugopal, V., Gregory, J., Chen, J., & Olivetti, E. (2024). Literature mining with large language models to assist the development of sustainable building materials. In Proceedings of the ICLR 2024 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning. Climate Change AI.
- Pfeiffer, O. P., Gong, K., Severson, K. A., Chen, J., Gregory, J. R., Ghosh, S., Goodwin, R. T., & Olivetti, E. A. (2024). Bayesian design of concrete with amortized Gaussian processes and multi-objective optimization. Cement and Concrete Research, 177, 107406.
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