At Dow, the power of data science is confronting sustainability

At Dow, one of the world’s largest materials sciences companies, mission matters.

Dow is one of the world’s largest materials sciences companies, and it faces immense challenges — to repeatedly innovate, to deliver practical solutions, and to do it all in a sustainable way. The company has an ambitious and public goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and it has projects and plans in place to account for 95% of its CO2 mitigation. That remaining 5% — it impassions the team at Dow.

15%

CO2 volume reduction from

2005-2020

95%

projection oF CO2 mitigation

by 2050

“Having innovative projects, pushing the boundaries of material science is part of what we do every day within R&D. And that 5% really motivates me to think about what we could do to push that even further to zero.”

James Wade

Research Scientist, Dow

“We're very serious about reaching carbon neutrality,” James Wade, research scientist says. “Having innovative projects, pushing the boundaries of material science is part of what we do every day within R&D. And that 5% really motivates me to think about what we could do to push that even further to zero?

“It’s something you hear us talking about all the time, because it really is part of our identity, not only as a research organization, but also as a company.”

To confront the challenge, Dow has made data science a priority throughout the organization, and it’s using Posit to empower “citizen data scientists” to find answers, share ideas, and collaborate on game-changing solutions.
Today, more than 300 Dow researchers utilize Posit, with even more benefiting indirectly through applications deployed on Posit Connect.

“Before we were regularly using the Posit suite of tools, a lot of the data science work we were doing was scattered,” Wade says. “We have a very capable and innovative bunch of researchers that are able to get a lot done with just about any set of tooling that you throw at them. However, the Posit tools have enabled an extremely low barrier to entry. That's allowed people who have an idea to go test that idea in a matter of minutes and to be able to share that with some of their colleagues with relative ease.”

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