Kathryn Carpenter is the Founder & CEO of Cecilia Materials, Inc., a Newark-based company that converts hard-to-recycle plastic waste into high-value advanced carbons for industrial applications. Kathryn has more than 16 years of private equity and infrastructure investing experience, having directed the development, engineering, procurement, construction, financing, and operation of over $2 billion in solar, wind, and energy storage assets across the United States. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Florida.

The idea for Cecilia grew out of Kathryn’s career in clean energy and infrastructure investing, where she saw a structural flaw in waste conversion projects. Conventional approaches take a low-value input, waste plastic, and produce a low-value output like degraded plastic or fuel, making the economics significantly challenged at any scale. She concluded that a truly circular economy requires upcycling plastic into something more valuable than to begin with. That thesis, tested through a 2021 research collaboration and co-invention with the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), became the foundation for Cecilia’s modular, microwave-based reactor.

Under Kathryn’s leadership, Cecilia has advanced from scientific proof of concept in 2022 to a pilot reactor commissioned in January 2025, supported along the way by four NASA awards and grant funding from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority and the Commission on Science, Innovation and Technology. Cecilia has also been a recipient of the Ocean Exchange Neptune Award and was named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies and World Changing Ideas lists.