Rosa Lab

Climate Solutions to Water, Energy, Food Systems

Addressing the most urgent questions surrounding the sustainability of the Earth System

Lorenzo Rosa
Department of Global Ecology
Carnegie Institution for Science
260 Panama St.
Stanford, CA 94305

lrosa@carnegiescience.edu

Join the group!

Postdoctoral scholar in net zero food systems and food security

Prospective postdocs are encouraged to apply to:

Lab Tabs

News

Jun

2022

Sustainable irrigation can feed billions, make agriculture resilient to climate change

By Carnegie HQ

Washington, DC— As climate change shifts precipitation patterns, irrigation can be a powerful tool for increasing the world’s food supply—feeding more than a billion additional people without ...

Mar

2022

New faculty at Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology bring a range of expertise

By Carnegie HQ

Washington, DC— New powerhouse scientific talent with broad expertise ranging from marine and freshwater biogeochemistry to terrestrial ecosystem science to climate change adaptation and mitigation ...

Our Research

We study climate change mitigation and adaptation solutions to food, energy, and water systems. We address the most urgent questions surrounding the sustainability of the Earth System. Our work aims to understand and find ways to address the challenge of meeting global demand for energy and food while averting environmental impacts.

Our focus spans across the fields of

i. sustainable food systems and adaptation of agriculture to global warming,

ii. climate change mitigation solutions,

iii. energy and environment,

iv. water scarcity and water sustainability.

Lab PI

Lorenzo Rosa

Staff Associate

Global Ecology

Carnegie Institution for Science

lrosa@carnegiescience.edu
Office:

Profile

Bio

Lorenzo Rosa is a Principal Investigator at the Department of Global Ecology at Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford. Prior to joining Carnegie, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Energy and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science from University of California Berkeley, and a B.S. and M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

His research aims to assess the potential benefits and unintended climate and environmental consequences of innovations engineered to satisfy the increasing global demands for energy, water, and food. He studies climate change mitigation and adaptation solutions to food, energy, and water systems. His current work is focusing on the role of irrigation to adapt agriculture to climate change, solutions to agricultural water scarcity, solutions to achieve net-zero emissions in agriculture, environmental implications of climate mitigation technologies, and the quantification of biomass-based carbon dioxide removal potential.

Dr. Rosa was awarded the 2019 AGU Horton Hydrology Research grant and the 2021 AGU Science for Solutions Award. He was also listed among the most influential young leaders in Science and Technology of 2020 by Forbes 30 Under 30. Recent publications can be found on his Google Scholar page.

Affiliation

Affiliation:

Labs:

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Scientific Interests

Water-Energy-Food Nexus

Global Sustainability

Sustainable Agriculture

Climate Change Mitigation/Adaptation

Energy and Environment

Websites

Rosa Lab

People

Yanlei Feng (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Yanlei is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Rosa Lab at the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford. As a researcher in earth science, she is deeply concerned about climate change and its impacts on natural ecosystems and humans. Her Ph.D. dissertation focused on the impact of extreme wind events, including hurricanes and severe thunderstorms, on tropical and temperate forests at multiple scales. Her work has contributed to the understanding of disturbance dynamics in tropical forests and climate change effects on tree mortality as part of the NGEE-Tropics project at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
Moving from climate impacts to climate mitigations, her postdoc research at Rosa Lab in Carnegie focuses on the field of biomass based carbon dioxide removal. She will explore the potential of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, how it can be deployed properly, and its environmental impacts.
In her spare time, she enjoys planting and managing her vegetable garden, running and hiking with her dog, and learning Traditional Chinese medicine.
Paolo Gabrielli (Visiting Investigator)
Paolo Gabrielli is a Senior Scientist at ETH Zurich, within the Institute of Energy and Process Engineering, and currently a Visiting Investigator at Carnegie Science thanks to a Fulbright scholarship. He holds a M.Sc. (2014) and a B.Sc. degree (2011), both in Energy and Nuclear Engineering, from the University of Bologna, and a Ph.D. (2019) from ETH Zurich. He performed his M.Sc. program at UCLA with an Overseas Scholarship and his M.Sc. thesis at DTU with an Excellence Scholarship, both granted by the University of Bologna. Before joining ETH Zurich, he had worked for General Electric Aviation (2014) and South Pole, a Swiss carbon finance consultancy (2019-2022).

His research activity deals with the modeling, optimization and assessment of net-zero energy systems, with focus on of the coupling of short- and long-term energy storage and of multiple energy carriers, on distributed energy systems, and on hydrogen and carbon supply chains for the chemical and aviation sectors. Within these application areas, he develops methods to reduce the complexity of optimization problems, mostly related to time series analysis and scenario reduction.
He also work on identifying and assessing possible strategies to enable net-zero carbon emissions in hard-to-abate sectors, focusing especially on the chemical industry.

Paolo Gabrielli was awarded the Hilti Prize 2021 for his PhD thesis, for innovative research that combines science with practical application in an exceptional manner. He received the Best Paper Award at the Applied Energy Conference ICAE2017 for his contribution to modeling and optimization of electrochemical technologies for multi-energy systems, and the Applied Energy Highly Cited Paper Awards 2020for his work on multi-energy systems with seasonal storage. Paolo Gabrielli represented ETH Zurich at the Global Young Scientists Summit in 2020.
Liyin He (Postdoctoral Fellow)

Liyin is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Rosa Lab at the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science. Her research aims to study sustainable food systems and adaptation of agriculture to global warming by using flux tower measurements, remote sensing, climate models and predictive analytics.

Before joining the Department of Global Ecology at Carnegie, Liyin obtained her B.Sc. in Geographic Information Science from Nanjing University and Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Engineering from California Institute of Technology. During her PhD, Liyin focused on using solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), to estimate the photosynthetic uptake of CO2 in forests and agricultural fields. She aimed to utilize the information acquired by satellite remote sensing across space and time, to help farmers assess the condition of crops, and to inform policy makers addressing food security and sustainability.
Davide Tonelli (Visiting Student)
Davide Tonelli is a third year PhD student at the Univeristé catholique de Louvain and the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. In 2021 he became fellow of Collège des Ingénieurs Italy, as part of the MBA program dedicated to PhD candidates. He graduated in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Genoa (2016), while receiving in parallel a diploma in trumpet at the conservatory of music G. Puccini. Afterwards, he joined ETH Zurich where he graduated in the M.Sc. Energy Science and Technology (2019). After an internship in the R&D Department of a gas turbine manufacturer and a short period as research assistant at ETH Zurich, his interest was captured by the rising role of hydrogen as a new carrier in the energy transition.

His research focuses on optimal design of hydrogen supply chain at different geographical scales of analysis. In the first part of his PhD, he worked on the integration of gradient-free optimization algorithms with mathematical programming to handle nonlinearities in the supply chain problem. He studied this integration with a case study of the Benelux area and a hydrogen demand associated to the chemical and the petrochemical industry.

The second part of his PhD concerns the definition of the optimal allocation of the production of renewable hydrogen at a global scale based on decarbonization scenarios for 2030 and 2050. His work will identify a benchmark evolution of the rising trade of hydrogen among countries with high potential of renewables and highly industrialized countries. As summer visiting student in the Department of Global Ecology at Carnegie Institution, he will work at the Rosa Lab to couple the cost-minimum allocation of hydrogen, with an analysis of the associated environmental impact.