Profile: Inventing a Net-Zero Carbon Future

Likely all entrepreneurs can agree that starting your own company is no easy feat. Neither is developing a technology that has the potential to decarbonize the fossil fuel industry. Marissa Beatty, PhD, founder and CEO of Turnover Labs — a start-up that produces electrolyzers that synthesize carbon-neutral chemicals from manufacturing emissions — has done both.

Beatty grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, MI, in a family of Ford engineers and computer whizzes. As a kid, she often found herself building projects in the garage with her dad and tagging along on his Home Depot supply runs. In 2008, when gas prices began to spike, she remembers how it sparked a national discussion around alternative fuels. Her dad — an owner of a Ford F350 truck — experimented with creating homemade biodiesel fuel. “That’s where I first got involved with chemical engineering,” recounts Beatty. As someone who was always interested in sustainability, she considered various career paths where she could exercise this passion, such as environmental biology. However, her love of chemistry, physics, and mathematics inspired her to pursue chemical engineering instead.

Beatty attended Michigan State Univ. for her BS in chemical engineering, where she continued to explore her excitement for sustainable technology. “I think sustainability and the transition to a net-carbon-zero future exists in chemical engineering because that’s how we get fuels and materials,” she points out. In college, she became fascinated with CO₂ transformation and its potential applications, including solar panels and CO₂-based in situ resource utilization in outer space. Toward the end of her undergraduate career, she pursued academic research, where she worked on electrochemical sensors. It was this experience that inspired her to attend graduate school. “I think I was just really hungry to work on stuff that would have a really big...