Christina Chang

Christina Chang is a partner at Lowercarbon Capital, where she incubates and invests in new technology startups with outsized climate impact. Chang has broad and deep experience in techno-economics, R&D, innovation, and patenting of clean energy technologies.

Most recently, Chang was a Fellow at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) within the U.S. Department of Energy, where she developed new research directions for sustainable manufacturing of commodities. In her two-year tenure as a federal employee, Chang initiated and co-led the Agency’s green steel thrust, including co-leading a 200-person workshop with senior stakeholders. She also performed quantitative technology impact studies spanning industrial decarbonization technology areas including process heat and chemical manufacturing, to inform and help create DOE initiatives under Secretary Granholm and President Biden, including the DOE Earthshots, Advanced Manufacturing Office funding opportunities, and U.S. involvement in COP26 in Glasgow. Notably, she conducted the initial technology analysis on carbon-negative building materials that led to ARPA-E’s $45M HESTIA programs. In addition to her innovative technology direction setting, Chang also led several millions of dollars of funding for startups across manufacturing, from sustainable cement to rare earth extraction from mine tailings, and actively co-managed these project teams quarterly. For her work at ARPA-E, Chang has been featured in Physics Today and Forbes.

Before her tenure at ARPA-E, Chang was CEO of the sustainable steel startup Abraze Engineering. As solo founder of the company, she led technical and market diligence, completed the NSF I-Corps Spark Program, filed a U.S. patent on the technology, and was the grand prize winner of the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge Ingenuity Award, presented by Harvard President Larry Bacow.