When Princeton University received a $100 million donation to study energy and climate change in 2008, the search committee need not have looked far to find the perfect candidate to be the founding director of the new center.

In 2010 Princeton named professor Emily Carter, a prominent theorist in engineering and chemistry, to lead the newly founded Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. Carter had been with the university since 2004 working on engineering and applied computational mathematics. She had won grants to study surface materials that would perform well in the high temperatures of jet engines and turbines, and was engaged in a quantum physics project that would eventually lead to a breakthrough in the computer simulation of materials.