There is a particular kind of scientist who sees the world not as it is, but as it could be rearranged. Jennifer Holmgren is that kind of scientist. Born in Colombia in 1962, she came to chemistry not through any obvious straight line but through a stubborn belief that the molecules beneath our feet and floating through our air are, as she might say, simply waiting to be reassigned.
She holds a B.Sc. from Harvey Mudd College, a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from the University of Chicago. What these credentials describe, though, is less a résumé than a deliberate accumulation of tools. She wanted to understand materials at their most fundamental level, and she also wanted to understand business, because one without the other, she seemed to understand early on, was not enough to change the world.
The Honeywell Chapter
Before LanzaTech, Jennifer spent years at UOP LLC, a Honeywell Company, where she served as Vice President and General Manager of the Renewable Energy and Chemicals business unit. Under her management, UOP technology became instrumental in producing nearly all of the initial fuels used by commercial airlines and the military for the testing and certification of alternative aviation fuel. It was pioneering work, but it was preparation for something larger.
Even then, the work pointed toward a deeper realization: reducing emissions alone would not fundamentally change the industrial system. Carbon itself needed a second life.
Carbon as a Resource, Not a Waste
When Jennifer joined LanzaTech as its CEO, she stepped into a company that was proposing something almost counterintuitive: that the carbon emissions pouring out of industrial facilities were not waste to be captured and buried, but raw material to be reused.
For Holmgren, the challenge was never simply about preventing carbon from entering the atmosphere. It was about redesigning the industrial equation altogether, transforming waste streams into productive assets within a circular economy.
LanzaTech’s technology works through gas fermentation. A specialty microbe processes carbon-rich industrial waste gases, including carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, and converts them into ethanol and other platform chemicals. Those chemicals become the building blocks of everyday products: packaging, textiles, and fuels. The company, publicly traded on Nasdaq under the ticker LNZA, has been called the world’s first public carbon transformation company.
In 2024, Dr. Holmgren appeared wearing a jacket made from recycled carbon emissions, a deliberate and quietly powerful statement about what her company can do. LanzaTech has partnered with Lululemon to create the world’s first fabric using recycled carbon emissions, turning industrial pollution into consumer goods.
What distinguishes LanzaTech is not only the science but the scalability of the model. The company’s systems are designed to integrate directly into existing industrial operations, allowing manufacturers, refineries, and heavy industries to convert emissions into commercially viable outputs without rebuilding their infrastructure from scratch. In doing so, LanzaTech positions sustainability not as a cost center, but as a new industrial value chain.
Awards and a Landmark Track Record
The recognition has followed the results. In 2015, Dr. Holmgren and her team at LanzaTech were awarded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Presidential Green Chemistry Award. That same year, she received the BIO Rosalind Franklin Award for Leadership in Industrial Biotechnology and the Outstanding Leadership Award in Corporate Social Innovation from the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago.
In 2016 and 2017, she was ranked number one on the list of the 100 most influential leaders in the Bioeconomy by Biofuels Digest. In 2022, she received an honorary doctorate from Delft University of Technology.
Also in 2022, LanzaTech entered the Earthshot Prize competition, becoming one of 15 global finalists and the only finalist from the United States, a competition established and backed by Prince William.
A CarbonSmart Future
Under Dr. Holmgren’s guidance, LanzaTech spun off LanzaJet, a sustainable aviation fuel production plant in Soperton, Georgia. The company is now working across China, Europe, and India, with Japan next on the horizon. The goal is not modest. It is to transform how the world thinks about carbon itself, not as a poison to be eliminated, but as a resource to be recaptured and reused.
“We are changing how people think about carbon by creating opportunities to create value from waste.”
Jennifer, for her part, seems to understand that a #CarbonSmart future will not be built in a single laboratory. It will be built facility by facility, molecule by molecule, over decades. She has been building it for more than twenty years, and she does not appear to be slowing down.
What makes her work especially consequential is that it challenges one of modern industry’s oldest assumptions: that economic growth and environmental responsibility must exist in tension with one another. Under her leadership, carbon is no longer merely an output to manage. It becomes an input, a resource, and potentially the foundation of an entirely new industrial system.
For Jennifer Holmgren, the future of sustainability is not about asking industry to stop producing. It is about teaching the industry how to produce differently.
