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Sarah Torkamani

Co-President of R&D Women Interest Network, Corporate Strategic Research at ExxonMobil 

Sarah Torkamani is a researcher at Corporate Strategic Research at ExxonMobil Research & Engineering Company (EMRE). She joined the company in 2013 and her research has focused on identifying low carbon energy options using life cycle assessment as a guiding principle. In 2018, she received EMRE’s R&D Excellence Award for anticipating future science needs in the biofuels area and developing novel ideas. Currently, she is the EMRE’s lead on a collaborative program with MIT on Understanding Carbon Mitigation Technologies.

Sarah is also the co-president of EMRE’s Women’s Interest Network with the mission of supporting and facilitating the professional achievement and personal development of women at ExxonMobil, while positively impacting the surrounding communities. 

Sarah has a diverse background in the clean energy field. She has been serving on the Pennsylvania State University advisory board for their online master’s program in the Renewable Energy and Sustainability Systems (RESS). She also served on the stakeholder advisory board of Northeast Woody/Warm-season Biomass Consortium (NEWBio) to help guide the multi-state effort focused on perennial biomass crops to enhance rural economic development in the Northeast region. 

Sarah holds a Ph.D. in chemical and environmental engineering from Sharif University of Technology with focus on biological sulfur removal from heavy crude oil. As an intern at Emden’s Fachhochschule, she worked on scaling up biogas production. During her post-doctoral research at Washington University, she led a study on the future of energy (a collaboration with 15 universities globally), and investigated algal biofuels production efficiency and clean coal technologies (oxy-combustion and gasification processes). In 2010, she joined Praxair Technology Center where she got two patents on innovative glass production processes that lead to a reduction in criteria pollutants and an increase in product quality.