SEED is led by Dr. Tapajyoti Ghosh and is building a team of graduate and undergraduate researchers who work across process systems engineering, industrial ecology, optimization, and AI. The group is new and growing — prospective students and collaborators are encouraged to get in touch.
Dr. Tapajyoti Ghosh
Assistant Professor · Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering · Institute for Northwest Energy Futures (INEF) · Washington State University Tri-Cities
Tapajyoti Ghosh is an Assistant Professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at Washington State University Tri-Cities and a faculty member of the Institute for Northwest Energy Futures, where he leads the SEED Research Group (Sustainable Engineering and Ecological Design). His research develops computational frameworks that bring life-cycle assessment, techno-economic analysis, optimization, and artificial intelligence together to design energy and industrial systems that are environmentally sustainable, economically viable, and socially equitable.
He earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University, held a postdoctoral position at the MIT Energy Initiative, and served as a Research Scientist and Senior Research Scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) before joining WSU. His work there produced open-source tools for automated life-cycle inventory construction, dynamic material-flow modeling of circular-economy systems, and integrated life-cycle and techno-economic analysis of decarbonization pathways. He has authored more than 25 peer-reviewed papers, has led over $2.1M in federal and industry research as principal investigator, and received NREL’s President’s Award for Research Contribution.
At WSU, his group couples process, supply-chain, economy, and policy scales in a single modeling framework, and formulates life-cycle, economic, and ecological performance inside process and systems optimization — with the goal of producing analyses that industry, regulators, and investors can act on.
Research interests
- Process systems engineering: flowsheet design, dynamic simulation and control, and superstructure optimization
- Life-cycle assessment: process-based, hybrid, prospective, and consequential methods, formulated inside the optimization
- Absolute-sustainability assessment against planetary boundaries and techno-ecological synergy
- Industrial ecology and dynamic material-flow analysis across supply and value chains
- Capacity expansion and integrated assessment for climate-aware, forward-looking decisions
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning for sustainability analytics and automated life-cycle inventories
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Open positions
We look for students interested in process systems engineering, optimization, industrial ecology and life-cycle assessment, and applied AI, and we support backgrounds in chemical, environmental, and systems engineering, as well as data science and applied mathematics.
If you are interested, email Dr. Ghosh with a short note about your background and research interests, along with a CV. Please include a sentence or two on which of the group’s directions interests you most.
Students and researchers
As the group grows, our graduate and undergraduate researchers will be introduced here.