The data products and services made available through TASA are the result of over a decade of academic research led by Drs. Yi Yang and Timothy Smith. Yi and Tim met at the University of Minnesota in 2009, where Tim is a professor of Sustainable Systems Management and Yi was pursuing a master’s degree. Yi eventually moved on to the University of California, Santa Barbara to complete his Ph.D., under the direction of Dr. Sangwon Suh, and later worked with Dr. Wes Ingwersen to lead the development of the US EPA’s US EEIO model. Meanwhile, Dr. Smith and his lab continued to advance spatial-temporal life-cycle inventory methods and streamlined LCA approaches. Tim and Yi reunited in 2015 at the University of Minnesota, where they continued collaborations in the broad area of hybrid-LCA.  

In 2020, Tim and Yi embarked on their current trajectory to make high-quality, actionable, and accessible carbon accounting resources available commercially through TASA. While not originally setting out to develop a new global EEIO data resource, they quickly realized the need for consistently constructed, high-resolution emissions data, expanded for corporate and supply chain carbon management applications. In only a short time, these data have been used by some of the largest companies in the world to inform supplier engagement programs, hybrid- and facility-level emissions estimates for high-emitting inputs, the identification and sizing of project-level interventions, and the implementation of carbon-free electricity programs in upstream supply chains – among others.