Wei Peng
Princeton University
Seminar Information
Engineering Building Unit 2 (EBU2)
Room 479
*Please Note that all the Spring'26 Energy Seminars will be at 1-2pm*
* This seminar is occurring on Monday (6/1)*
No Seminar Recording Available
Decarbonizing the energy system has the potential to generate substantial air quality and health co-benefits. However, the magnitude of these benefits depends strongly on technology choices and their interaction with socio-demographic patterns that shape the size and vulnerability of exposed populations. This raises important policy questions about how the benefits and costs of decarbonization are distributed across regions and population groups. In this talk, I will present our group's work on developing integrated energy–air pollution–health modeling frameworks to evaluate the health implications of decarbonization. I will highlight recent work on how global mitigation strategies produce uneven air quality and health outcomes across countries, as well as how the U.S. energy transition influences exposure disparities to air pollution among population groups.
Wei Peng is an assistant professor in the School of Public and International Affairs and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. She is a climate policy researcher and an integrated assessment modeler of energy, climate, and health. Her work focuses on modeling human-centered decarbonization pathways to inform energy strategies that are realistically implementable and politically durable. Her research has been published in Nature, Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability, PNAS among others, and was featured in national and local media such as PBS and NPR. She served as a contributing author of the U.S. Fifth National Climate Assessment and currently serves on a National Academies’ committee developing a Roadmap for Transformative Action to Achieve Health for All at Net-Zero Emissions. Peng received her PhD degree in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy from Princeton University and her Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Sciences from Peking University. She was a faculty member at the Penn State University and a postdoc fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.