Dr. Micah S. Ziegler is a postdoctoral associate at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He evaluates sustainable energy and chemical technologies, their impact, and their potential. Dr. Ziegler’s research helps to shape robust strategies to accelerate the improvement and deployment of technologies that can enable a global transition to sustainable and equitable energy systems. His approach relies on collecting and curating large empirical datasets from multiple sources and building data-informed models.  His work informs research and development, public policy, and financial investment.

At MIT, Dr. Ziegler is evaluating established and emerging energy technologies, particularly energy storage. He examines how rapidly and why energy storage technologies have changed over time to determine how their improvement can be accelerated. He is also studying how energy storage could be used to integrate solar and wind resources into a reliable energy system.

Dr. Ziegler earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.S. in Chemistry, summa cum laude, from Yale University. In graduate school, he primarily investigated dicopper complexes, including their synthesis, reactivity, catalysis, and unexpected characteristics, in order to enable the use of earth-abundant, first-row transition metals in small molecule transformations and catalysis. Before graduate school, he worked in the Climate and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute (WRI). At WRI, he explored how to improve mutual trust and confidence among parties developing international climate change policy and researched carbon dioxide capture and storage, electricity transmission, and international energy technology policy. Dr. Ziegler was also a Luce Scholar assigned to the Business Environment Council in Hong Kong, where he helped advise businesses on measuring and managing their environmental sustainability.