About this event
Sustainable Aviation: Insights into Mitigating Contrails
Commercial aviation accounts for over 2.5% of global carbon dioxide emissions, making business air travel a significant contributor to many organizations' carbon footprints. While pathways like sustainable aviation fuel are still emerging, there are considerable opportunities within the aviation industry to reduce emissions—especially through contrail mitigation. In this webinar, Marc Shapiro, Director of Contrails at Breakthrough Energy, and Colin McCormick, Principal Scientist at Carbon Direct, will explore strategies and innovations for contrail mitigation.
Key takeaways:
- The impact of contrails on flight emissions.
- How modeling different flight routes can affect contrail-related emissions.
- The latest advancements in calculating flight contrail emissions.
Hosted by
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Guest speaker
Colin McCormick Principal Scientist @ Carbon DirectG
Dr. Colin McCormick provides science and technology expertise across a wide range of engineered carbon removal methods and industrial decarbonization sectors. He also supports Carbon Direct’s work in data science and remote sensing, life-cycle analysis, and carbon removal policy analysis. Dr. Colin McCormick previously served as the Senior Advisor for R&D at the US Department of Energy where he helped oversee the full applied energy research portfolio, and as a Professional Staff Member for the House Science & Technology Committee. Prior to this he conducted research in applied quantum optics and atomic physics at UC Berkeley and NIST. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Science, Technology and International Affairs program, Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and a Member of the District of Columbia Commission on Climate Change and Resiliency.
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Guest speaker
Jessica Walkenhorst Staff Research Data Scientist @ Carbon DirectG
Dr. Jessica Walkenhorst works at the intersection of data science, machine learning and climate. Before Carbon Direct, she worked at an electric vehicle start-up, building design-optimization software and prior to this led one of the UK’s big six utility companies’ data science research efforts. She obtained her PhD in Spain, where she researched how to combine computational spectroscopy with optimal control theory to optimize optical properties of atoms and molecules. Jessica is heavily involved in London’s data-science scene, where she co-organizes London’s PyData Meetup and regularly volunteers at DataKind’s hackathon weekends.
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Guest speaker
Marc Shapiro Director, ContrailsG
Marc is the Director of the Breakthrough Energy Contrails team. The Contrails team works with leading academic groups, tech companies, and airlines to decrease the warming impact of aviation through contrail avoidance and mitigation tools. Marc brings a pragmatic approach to the effort to generate opportunities for verifiable mitigation in the near future. Prior to Breakthrough Energy, Marc worked as an applied scientist and entrepreneur in a diverse set of R&D efforts across fluid mechanics, geospatial analytics, and mobile health-care. He is motivated to harness modern science, data, and technology to design creative solutions for intractable human and climate issues. In 2020, he started a company to develop geospatial data systems for climate mitigation and adaptation. Most recently, he transitioned to building the research effort that would eventually become the Breakthrough Contrails project.
Carbon Direct
Go from climate goal to climate action.Carbon Direct is a science-first carbon management firm that helps organizations reduce their carbon footprint with their end-to-end platform.
