Amma Agyei Boakye
DOCTORAL CANDIDATE AT THE YALE SCHOOL OF THE ENVIRONMENT
WHEN IT CAME TIME TO CHOOSE a university major, Amma Asantewaa Agyei Boakye noticed a clear trend among her classmates at the boarding school she attended in Cape Coast, a few hours from her home in Accra, Ghana. Most of the girls were gravitating toward medicine, widely seen as a safe, practical, and rewarding career.
But Agyei Boakye was drawn to something different. “I loved physics,” she recalled. “I became intrigued by engineering when I looked at the list of courses.” Though she didn’t know much about the field initially, she was hooked by its breadth.
“As I studied it more, I started to appreciate its versatility and just the many career prospects and how broad it is,” Agyei Boakye said.
Today, as a doctoral candidate in Industrial Ecology and Sustainable Systems at the Yale School of the Environment, she’s still drawn to that scope, and building upon a strong academic foundation. Agyei Boakye studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate and went on to earn a master’s degree in environmental management before turning her focus to life cycle assessments.
When asked about culture shock after moving to the United States, Agyei Boakye pointed to the overwhelming selection of products in supermarkets. “There were so many jasmines,” she said, recalling her surprise in the rice aisle. “It’s great to see all these things exist, but which one is the jasmine I’m used to?” she chuckled.
HOLISTIC APPROACH
Agyei Boakye’s current research explores the environmental trade-offs and systems-level implications of adopting emerging energy technologies at scale. She is particularly focused on two of them: biohydrogen and industrial heat pumps. “Energy is used in so many sectors—transportation, food processing, agriculture,” she said. “If you’re able to figure out the energy bit of it, you’ve figured out a huge chunk of the pie.”
Her research combines material flow analysis, life cycle assessment, and technology adoption modeling to evaluate future pathways and impacts. “I’m trying to understand how much copper, how much steel, how much refrigerant would be required if all manufacturing sites in the U.S. adopted heat pumps,” she said, emphasizing the importance of seeing the bigger picture. “We’re not just thinking about the emissions benefits from replacing a boiler, but the entire life cycle environmental impacts.”
Agyei Boakye’s approach is holistic. Her upbringing and career across Ghana and the U.S. have given her a global, context-sensitive lens. “A technology that might be emerging in one country is not necessarily emerging in another,” she noted. “You have to think about how you can customize solutions to fit the specific needs of people.” That sensibility was sharpened by her time working in industry, where she helped launch a corporate sustainability strategy and realized how much she valued applied work.
“I have worked with stakeholders from all over the world, and it has taught me to be a sort of translator across cultures,” she said. “It’s made me more flexible and curious, which I think are important skills for a researcher to have.”
She believes sustainability assessments are becoming more holistic and forward-looking, expanding beyond greenhouse gases to include social, economic, and contextual considerations. “In the past, we laser-focused on specific things, but for something to be truly sustainable, it has to be socially sustainable too,” she said. “You need systems thinking. Otherwise, we risk jumping on a technology without understanding unintended consequences.”
Her advice for early-career engineers: Don’t follow her path—forge your own. “Stay curious and keep an open mind,” she said. “You might surprise yourself.”
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