About

Deepak Rajagopal is a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability where he conducts research on life cycle assessment, industrial ecology, energy and agricultural economics and policy. He is also the Director of the Leadership in Sustainability Certificate Program at UCLA. Dr. Rajagopal received his Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, where he was a researcher at the Energy Biosciences Institute. He holds a M.S. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park. His educational background also includes a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India. His ongoing research focuses on sustainable transportation, healthcare, applied economic analysis of energy and environmental policies, and lifecycle assessment of various sectors including transportation, healthcare, and food systems. Dr. Rajagopal has contributed to understanding the environmental impacts of electric vehicles, biofuels, and sustainable management practices, and has published extensively on these topics.

Research topics

• Engineering
• Business
• Economics
• Environmental science
• Biotechnology
• Macroeconomics
• Agricultural economics
• Market economy
• Electrical engineering
• Biology
• Automotive engineering
• Marketing
• Economic growth
• Natural resource economics
• Ecology

Selected publications

• Prioritizing green hydrogen use based on alternative metrics of potential environmental and economic impact

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A new heuristic framework for estimating indirect (Scope 3) emissions of large organizations

  Scientific Reports · 2025-10-21 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Large businesses and organizations are pledging voluntary actions for climate change mitigation. Alongside such pledges, government regulations that mandate climate-related disclosures for large corporations are also emerging. Both for compliance with such mandates and effective voluntary action, organizations need reliable information on their indirect emissions, which refers to emissions arising upstream and downstream to their own operations, and which, for many types of industries (such as education, finance, health care, hospitality and retail) can be several-times their own or direct emissions. However, the best approach to estimating indirect emissions requires conducting a life cycle assessment (LCA) for a large number (potentially thousands) of different products and services, which is costly. To overcome this, we present a heuristic approach that combines insights derived from LCA and data analytic techniques to identify a relatively small number of products that might account for a large share of indirect emissions, specifically Scope 3 emissions. We apply our approach to a dataset comprising over 25,000 products spanning 105 different product categories, purchased by a large tertiary-care hospital and show that this can help organizations prioritize actions aimed at reducing their indirect emissions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evaluating the Risk-Adjusted Returns across Large-Cap, Mid-Cap and Small-Cap Mutual Funds: Investor Insights and Implications

  2025-04-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study examines the risk-adjusted returns of large-cap, mid-cap, and small-cap mutual funds to provide insights for investors seeking optimal portfolio allocation. Using key performance metrics such as the Sharpe ratio, Treynor ratio, and Jensen’s alpha, the analysis evaluates the risk-return tradeoff across different market capitalizations. Findings indicate that while small-cap funds tend to offer higher absolute returns, they exhibit greater volatility, whereas large-cap funds provide more stability with lower risk-adjusted performance. Mid-cap funds balance risk and return but demonstrate varying performance across market cycles. The study's results have significant implications for investors aiming to optimize diversification strategies based on risk tolerance and investment objectives. In summary, large-cap funds provide safety, mid-cap funds offer balanced growth, and small-cap funds deliver the highest return potential but with elevated risk. Investors should select funds based on their risk tolerance, with large caps for stability, mid caps for moderate risk-reward, and small caps for aggressive growth.

  PublisherDOI

• A Vision for Computational Decarbonization of Societal Infrastructure

  IEEE Internet Computing · 2025-03-01 · 4 citations

  article

  Modern society is at a critical inflection point with rapidly accelerating demand for energy due to growth in domestic manufacturing, datacenters, artificial intelligence (AI), electric vehicles, and electric heat pumps. Sustaining this growth while also reducing society’s carbon emissions will necessitate a shift beyond our long-standing focus on improving energy-efficiency to optimizing carbon-efficiency. This paper lays out a vision for a new field of Computational Decarbonization (CoDec), which focuses on optimizing and reducing the lifecycle carbon emissions of complex computing and societal infrastructure systems. We identify an important class of decarbonization problems that arise from interdependencies across multiple infrastructure domains, including computing, transportation, the built environment, and the electric power grid. As we discuss, solving these problems will require developing novel computational techniques, algorithms, systems, and AI methods that sense, optimize, and reduce the operational, embodied, and lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of societal infrastructure over long temporal and spatial scales.

  PublisherDOI

• Behavioral interventions for waste reduction: a systematic review of experimental studies

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2025-06-24 · 10 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior author

  Introduction: Wasteful behavior poses major environmental, economic, and social challenges, yet the behavioral science literature on waste reduction remains fragmented. Methods: This systematic review synthesizes 99 experimental and quasi-experimental studies published between 2017 and 2021 that test behavioral interventions to reduce waste. This period captures a critical phase when global waste management systems faced unprecedented disruptions, including the 2017 launch of China's National Sword policy, which dramatically reshaped global recycling markets and exposed critical weaknesses in international waste systems. We adopt a broad definition of waste-including both discarded materials (e.g., food, trash, recyclables) and inefficient resource use (e.g., electricity, water, fuel)-to better capture the full range of behaviors where interventions can reduce environmental impact and allow cross-domain comparisons. Our goal is to examine the behavioral interventions used, how interventions are structured, how behavior is measured, and whether they target individuals, households, communities, or broader systems. Results: We identify six common types of behavioral interventions: education/informational feedback, social norms, economic incentives, cognitive biases and choice architecture, goal setting, and emotional appeals. Interventions targeting electricity and water use were most common, while food and solid waste remain under studied, largely due to measurement challenges. Although most studies used real-world field designs with direct behavioral outcomes, they focused heavily on individual and household behavior. Discussion: This individual focus risks overlooking the structural and systemic changes needed to achieve broader, sustained reductions in waste. To advance the field, we call for greater use of community-level and system-wide interventions, investment in scalable measurement tools, and stronger collaboration between researchers, governments, and practitioners. Building on this foundation can help create more effective, scalable strategies to reduce waste across behavioral contexts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Theoretical and Empirical Arguments for Zero Emission Vehicle Mandates

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Life cycle and techno-economic assessment of bioresource production from wastewater

  npj Clean Water · 2024-03-21 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Thermochemical conversion technologies present an opportunity to flip the paradigm of wastewater biosolids management operations from energy-intense and expensive waste management processes into energy-positive and economical resource extraction centers. Herein, we present a uniform “grading framework” to consistently evaluate the environmental and commercial benefits of established and emerging wastewater biosolids management processes from a life cycle and techno-economic perspective. Application of this approach reveals that established wastewater biosolids management practices such as landfilling, land application, incineration, and anaerobic digestion, while commercially viable, offer little environmental benefit. On the other hand, emerging thermochemical bioresource recovery technologies such as hydrothermal liquefaction, gasification, pyrolysis, and torrefaction show potential to provide substantial economic and environmental benefit through the recovery of carbon and nutrients from wastewater biosolids in the form of biofuels, fertilizers, and other high-value products. Some emerging thermochemical technologies have developed beyond pilot scale although their commercial viability remains to be seen.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reducing life cycle material, energy and emissions for liquid consumer products through printing

  Resources Conservation and Recycling · 2023-05-28 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Implications of the energy transition for government revenues, energy imports and employment: The case of electric vehicles in India

  Energy Policy · 2023-02-11 · 31 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Whereas the environmental benefits of transitioning away from fossil fuels are becoming indisputable, the implications for government revenues, employment, balance of trade, and employment appear less clear. Using an accounting-like framework, we analyze the potential near to medium-term implications of electric vehicles displacing internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Total cost of ownership (TCO), imports, government revenues, employment and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are each lower with EVs under different market and policy scenarios considered. An exception is a steep fall in oil prices (say by 50% from current levels), which increases net energy imports when battery cells are imported. Targeting high usage vehicles for EV adoption amplifies reduction in TCO, GHG emissions and imports but also leads to greater reduction in tax revenues. Furthermore, foregone tax revenues from avoided fossil fuel consumption is several times greater than the subsidies to EVs in the form of preferential tax rates. On a per vehicle basis, each fossil fuel vehicle generates over six-fold greater taxes over its life relative to an EV. Whereas economic growth and public policy can mitigate adverse impacts on government revenues and employment, simultaneously reducing total emissions as well will, if history is a guide, be more challenging.

  PublisherDOI

• Life cycle energy, climate, and economic assessment of technologies for bioresource production from wastewater

  Research Square · 2023-05-02 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Zilberman

  76 shared

• Gal Hochman

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  63 shared

• Govinda R. Timilsina

  World Bank Group

  21 shared

• Steven Sexton

  Duke University

  11 shared

• David Roland‐Holst

  7 shared

• Amol Phadke

  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  7 shared

• Jennifer A. Jay

  University of California, Los Angeles

  4 shared

• Eric M.V. Hoek

  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  4 shared

Labs

• Deepak Rajagopal LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Environmental Science and Engineering

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2006

• M.S., Environmental Science and Engineering

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2002

• B.S., Environmental Science

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2000