Jessika Trancik

Jessika Trancik is a Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she serves as Director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, effective July 1, 2025. Within Engineering, her research focuses on the dynamic costs, performance, and environmental impacts of energy systems to inform climate policy and accelerate beneficial and equitable technology innovation. Her projects address all energy services, including electricity, transportation, heating, and industrial processes, spanning technologies such as solar energy, wind energy, energy storage, low-carbon fuels, electric vehicles, and nuclear fission. Trancik has contributed to measuring progress in solar photovoltaics, batteries, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, and low-carbon technologies by quantifying learning rates for innovation policy. She developed the carboncounter.com app to assist users in choosing vehicles with low environmental impacts.

Trancik received her B.S. in materials science and engineering from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in materials science from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Before joining MIT in 2010, she worked at the United Nations office in Geneva with WSP International/UNOPS (now Interpeace), at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and as an Omidyar Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, where she remains an external professor. Her highly cited publications include "Net-zero emissions energy systems" in Science (2018), "Re-examining rates of lithium-ion battery technology improvement and cost decline" in Energy & Environmental Science (2021), "Evaluating the causes of cost reduction in photovoltaic modules" in Energy Policy (2018), "Storage requirements and costs of shaping renewable energy toward grid decarbonization" in Joule (2019), "Value of storage technologies for wind and solar energy" in Nature Climate Change (2016), and "Statistical basis for predicting technological progress" in PLOS ONE (2013). With over 8,700 citations on Google Scholar, her work influences energy technology evaluation and pathways to decarbonization. She was named a 2011 PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellow.

Professional Email: trancik@mit.edu