Karma Sawyer, Ph.D.

Dr. Karma Sawyer (RECS 2010) is an ARPA-E Fellow and is initially focusing on new materials and chemistry for carbon capture and sequestration, and supporting Program Directors in program creation and management. In 2006, she was named a fellow at the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund and worked at the Telluride Research Center in the Probing Dynamics of Liquids and Biomolecules program. As a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the University of California at Berkeley, Dr. Sawyer investigated phonon localization in silicon nanowires for thermoelectric applications and novel photoinitiated methods of carbon capture. She has authored ten publications in the areas of physical chemistry and materials science and is a member of the American Chemical Society, the Materials Research Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Sawyer received a B.S. with Honors in Chemistry from Syracuse University. She received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 2008, where her thesis research was focused on spin-crossover dynamics and homogeneous catalysis reactions using ultrafast infrared spectroscopy and density functional theory calculations.