Alexandra Victoria Tavasoli

Assistant Professor

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

Research Interests

Alex’s research group, the Laboratory of Future Industry (LoFI) designs, builds, and evaluates emerging and alternative architectures for sustainable industrial production and energy systems. Our current research is centred on the three following themes:

• Community-driven engineering design: Locally implementable production or energy systems that boost supply chain resilience against climate disasters and geopolitical shocks. Focus on low fidelity systems that make use of easily attainable materials and components for their construction.
• Systems that make use of concentrated solar energy: Industrial production processes and energy systems that harness concentrated solar energy, including chemical and materials manufacturing, water desalination or purification, atmospheric water harvesting, cooling, and more.
• Low-carbon chemical and material manufacturing processes: Design of sustainable processes that enable the circular economy, analyzed to determine optimal implementation strategies through techno-economic, life cycle, and social impact assessments.

A list of publications can be found on LoFI’s website.

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: