Eric Masanet is the Mellichamp chair in sustainability science for emerging technologies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research develops energy and materials systems models to identify technology and policy pathways for improving the energy and resource efficiency of industrial systems. He also focuses on energy and policy analysis for data centers and information technology systems.
He previously led the Energy Demand Technology Unit at the International Energy Agency in Paris, where he oversaw energy analyses of the global industrial, transport, and buildings sectors. He is also the former editor in chief of Resources, Conservation, and Recycling, the leading peer-reviewed journal on sustainable resource systems. From 2012 to 2019, he was an associate professor in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University. From 2004 to 2012, he was a research scientist and deputy head in the International Energy Studies Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). While at LBNL, he held a joint research appointment in UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering, where he also served as program manager for the Engineering and Business for Sustainability Certificate Program. He holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley, with an emphasis in sustainable manufacturing.