Aisulu Aitbekova joins ChemE faculty

Aisulu Aitbekova will join the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of chemical engineering, beginning in August 2025.

Aitbekova is currently a Kavli Nanoscience Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Stanford University in 2021, her master's degree in chemical engineering practice from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016, and her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, in 2015.

Aitbekova is developing solar-driven processes to generate sustainable fuels and chemicals. "Sunlight is abundant and free. It opens pathways that aren't accessible with traditional approaches," she says.

The current chemical industry is built to use fossil fuels as raw materials. Aitbekova's research will help the industry transition to sustainable feed stocks, such as recycled plastic, carbon dioxide that can be pulled from air or ocean water, and biomass. She is developing sustainable processes that use sunlight for chemical conversions.

There are a variety of ways to harness sunlight. At the macroscale, for example, a solar-driven reactor could use sunlight to generate heat or electricity. Inside the reactor, novel catalytic materials could facilitate solar-driven chemical conversion processes at micro- and nano-scales.

"If we want to develop a new process, one that is very different from what we currently have, we need innovations at many different scales," says Aitbekova. Her experience extends from developing materials at the nanoscale, to controlling the environment around these materials at the microscale, to developing processes at the macroscale.

Aitbekova's journey to this research began when she traveled from Kazakhstan to the US for an undergraduate summer research internship. Her mentor introduced her to the idea of graduate school.

To pay forward the guidance she received, Aitbekova aims to be a bridge to graduate school for students from diverse backgrounds. As a postdoctoral fellow, she played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Caltech Accountability Partners Program, which helps undergraduate students apply to graduate school, and she is looking forward to continuing her outreach at Carnegie Mellon.

For media inquiries, please contact Lauren Smith at lsmith2@andrew.cmu.edu.