UMass Amherst ELEVATE Program Seeks New PhD Student Fellows
My name is Matthew Lackner and I am the director of the ELEVATE program and a professor in Mechanical Engineering at UMass Amherst. My background is in offshore wind energy - in 2004, while working on my Master's research on jet engines, I stumbled on a sustainable energy course where I learned about renewable energy and the energy system, and I have been hooked on wind turbines ever since. My research has mostly focused on improving the aerodynamic performance and reliability of floating offshore wind turbines.
While offshore wind turbines are still my "first love," it is clear that solving the climate change emergency requires a much broader perspective. The energy system is the foundation on which modern society is built, and the transition from today’s system to one based on renewable energy and electrification over the next three decades is one of the great challenges and opportunities facing humanity. The technical challenges alone are daunting, but the energy transition must occur in the context of a changing and uncertain climate. The radical evolution of our energy system and infrastructure will have profound socioeconomic impacts on society.
In 2019, our team of faculty from across the UMass Amherst campus began developing interdisciplinary proposals focused on solving technical, equity, and climate challenges in the energy transition. In 2020, we were extremely fortunate to be awarded two grants from the National Science Foundation (NRT and GCR) on this topic, and with those grants we have formed the ELEVATE program.
ELEVATE is a highly interdisciplinary PhD program with faculty from 10 participating departments. Our vision is to recruit and educate outstanding PhD students who will participate in an innovative, dynamic, and supportive STEM program, and then for those students to go out into the world and make a positive impact. ELEVATE Fellows will be part of a community of researchers who collaborate across disciplines and create innovative and equitable solutions to tackle key challenges in the energy transition.
We are now one year into the program, and despite COVID-19 and other difficulties of the past year, we are off to a fantastic start. Our success is primarily due to the exceptional group of 8 PhD students who make up our first class of ELEVATE Fellows. Their enthusiasm, intelligence, and leadership has already catalyzed new research projects, created a warm community, and laid the foundation for the future success of ELEVATE. Our 25 faculty members have also enthusiastically embraced the spirit of the program by engaging in collaborative exercises designed to generate new convergence research ideas that integrate multiple disciplines.
A highlight of the program to date has been our Monthly Convergence Meetings that include the entire team of students and faculty. We have used collaborative and competitive games to produce fun and engaging meetings that also enable our team to understand different disciplinary perspectives . Recently, we ran a Climate Action Simulation game in which team members represented various interest groups in the energy system and negotiated a solution to limit global warming to non-catastrophic levels.
While the ELEVATE program is still in early stages , new research collaborations have already begun. For example, faculty and PhD students from Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Resource Economics have begun a collaboration that emphasizes equitable decarbonization of residential heating and solar deployments. On the residential heating front, Professor Prashant Shenoy, Professor David Irwin, and PhD student John Wamburu are focusing on a data-driven approach to study decarbonizing of heating in the smart grid. Their work has a key emphasis on equity and involves the design of data-driven techniques that incorporate the notion of equity into the decision-making process. Over the past year, they collaborated with a local utility company to (i) design algorithms to automatically infer the source of heating in each home using only gas and electricity usage data, and (ii) identify homes with high carbon usage, based on the heating source and the winter heating load. In collaboration with Professor Christine Crago and PhD student Emma Grazier in Resource Economics, the team is incorporating census data into data driven algorithms, as well as real estate data, to ensure equitable outcomes in the algorithm outputs (e.g. to ensure homes identified as candidates for decarbonization of their heating equipment should be equitably distributed across the community). This will be a major focus of future research.
The ELEVATE core course “Energy Markets and Equitable Energy Systems” is being taught for the first time this fall by Professor Golbon Zakeri to the Fellows and other students. This class teaches the foundations of energy markets, with a focus on the transition to clean, just, and equitable access to energy. This class covers some basic economics, foundations of electricity markets, and discussion of other energy, climate, and equity issues. The class is designed to be highly discussion driven and uses simulation and games for interactive learning.
In the coming year, we hope to recruit and welcome a new class of ELEVATE Fellows for the Fall of 2022.
We are looking for students with:
Strong scholarship in at least one of the fields closely related to the program: anthropology, civil engineering, computer science, cultural anthropology, economics, environmental science & policy, electrical engineering, geosciences, industrial engineering & operations research, mechanical engineering.
A clear commitment to social equity and/or passion for sustainable energy and tackling climate change.
Strong collaboration skills and excitement to work in a diverse team.
Prospective Fellows are nominated by faculty and successful nominees will receive highly competitive funding offers. I can be reached at lackner@umass.edu and look forward to answering any questions from interested faculty and students!
