Karma Sawyer

Karma Sawyer is an Assistant Program Director and is responsible for the ARPA-E's Innovative Materials and Processes for Advanced Carbon Capture Technologies (IMPACCT) program. In addition to CO2 capture technologies, Sawyer is interested in zero-carbon liquid fuels production, O2 separation technologies, thermal storage and H2 production.

Sawyer originally joined ARPA-E as a fellow in 2010, where she performed technical, environmental and economic assessment of CO2 capture, utilization and sequestration, methods for direct natural gas to liquids conversion and thermal storage. Prior to joining ARPA-E, Sawyer worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley where she studied phonon localization in silicon nanowires for thermoelectric applications and direct air CO2 capture as a member of the editorial committee for a technology assessment for the American Physical Society Panel on Public Affairs.

Sawyer was named a AAAS Science and Technology Policy fellow at ARPA-E (2010)and a fellow at the American Chemical Society-Petroleum Research Fund Summer School as part of the "Probing Dynamics of Liquids and Biomolecules" program (2006). She has authored ten publications and fifteen conference proceedings in the areas of energy, physical chemistry and materials science.

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, focusing on spin-crossover dynamics and homogeneous catalysis reactions using ultrafast infrared spectroscopy and density functional theory (DFT) calculations.