Alexandra Victoria Tavasoli

Assistant Professor

BASc, PhD (University of Toronto); Postdoctoral Appointment (MIT)

Research Interests

• Industrial decarbonization
• Community-based and/or distributed infrastructure
• Chemical and material manufacturing processes

Alex’s research group, the Laboratory of Future Industry (LoFI), studies low-impact chemical and materials manufacturing systems that integrate sustainably into the earth’s natural ecology and our human social environment. LoFI’s research aims to: (1) identify the resource needs of the future low-carbon world; (2) understand the complex industrial ecosystems that enable the transformation of raw materials into economic and social value; (3) design and build innovative chemical and materials manufacturing processes to meet these needs; and (4) elucidate implementation strategies that lower the barriers facing the widespread adoption of these new industrial systems.

Current Projects

• Chemical and materials manufacturing process design: Passive, modular, and distributed processes that enable the circular or low-carbon economy.
• Solar-driven chemical manufacturing: Photocatalytic and photoelectrochemical capture and conversion of greenhouse gases into commodity chemicals.
• Implementation strategies for low-carbon industrial processes: Techno-economic, life cycle, and social impact analyses that assess the value of different implementation scenarios for novel manufacturing processes.

Selected Publications

• Life cycle environmental performance of methanol production through photocatalytic dry methane reforming. Robbins, B., Gaona, A., Tavasoli, A., Bergerson, J.A., Saville, B., MacLean, H.L., Journal of CO₂ Utilization (2024)
• Enhanced hybrid photocatalytic dry reforming using a phosphated Ni-CeO₂ nanorod heterostructure.Tavasoli, A., Gouda, A., Zähringer, T., Li, Y.F., Quaid, H., Viasus Perez, C.J., Song, R., Sain, M., Ozin, G., Nature Communications (2023)
• It’s not just gas stoves- we may have to give up fire completely to save the planet. Tavasoli, A., Hostetter, S., Corporate Knights Magazine (2023)
• Rail-based direct air carbon capture. Bachman, E., Tavasoli, A., Hatton, T.A., Maravelius, C.T., Haites, E., Styring, P., Aspuru-Guzik, A., MacIntosh, J., Ozin, G., Joule (2022)
• Photocatalytic dry reforming: What is it good for? Tavasoli, A., Preston, M., Ozin, G., Energy & Environmental Science (2021)
• High-performance light-driven heterogeneous CO2 catalysis with near-unity selectivity on metal phosphides. Xu, Y.F., Duchesne, P.N., Wang, L., Tavasoli, A., Ali, F.M., Xia, M., Liao, J.F., Kuang, D.B., Ozin, G. Nature Communications (2020)
• Is it time for an ethical renaissance in the engineering profession? Ghoussoub, M., Tavasoli, A., Corporate Knights Magazine (2020)
• Towards solar methanol: Past, present, future. Tountas, A.A., Peng, X., Tavasoli, A., Duchesne, P.N., Dingle, T., Dong, Y., Hurtado, L., Mohan, A., Sun, W., Ulmer, U., Wang, L., Wood, T., Maravelius, C., Sain, M., Ozin, G., Advanced Science (2019)

For a full list of publications, visit my profile on: