#SLAGCEnergy
SPEAKERS
ANN CARLSON
LAW
Greening The L.A. Power Grid: Comparing the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Southern California Edison regulatory models
Ann Carlson is the Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law and the Faculty Co-Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law. Carlson is also on the faculty at the UCLA Institute of the Environment. She is a leading scholar of climate, energy and air pollution law and policy and the recipient of UCLA's Eby Award for the Art of Teaching and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. She recently served on a National Academy of Sciences panel, America’s Climate Choices: Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change, and she is currently serving on an American Academy of Arts and Sciences panel studying the future of America’s energy systems. Carlson is also a frequent commentator and speaker on environmental issues, particularly on climate change, and she often blogs at Legal Planet.
BRAD SHAFFER
ECOLOGY & EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
Can California deserts deliver green energy and biodiversity protection?
Brad Shaffer is a UCLA Distinguished Professor with joint appointments in the Institute of Environment & Sustainability and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He moved from UC Davis in 2012 to be the founding director of the UCLA/La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science, and remains in that position. Brad’s research resides at the intersection of conservation biology, genomics, and the evolutionary ecology of reptiles and amphibians, and his work takes him to remote field sites around the glove and vacant lots in Los Angeles. He has received teaching awards at the campus and national level, and is past president of the American Genetic Association and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. He is also passionate about the importance of biological field stations as a way to lure people away from their computers and get them to study nature. He is also the director of two field stations in the Santa Monica Mountains.
CHEE WEI WONG
ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING
Automated vehicles for sustainable cities: Field experiments and future outlooks in Los Angeles
Chee Wei Wong is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and examines precision lasers measurements in mesoscopic systems. He is a fellow of multiple societies, and recipient of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award, NSF CAREER Award, Google Faculty Award and 3M Faculty Award among others. He received the D.Sc. and M.Sc. from MIT (2003), and the B.Sc. and B.A (1999), both with highest distinction from UC Berkeley.
DEEPAK RAJAGOPAL
INSTITUTE OF THE ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY
Life cycle assessment of alternative fuels from waste biomass resources
Deepak Rajagopal is an assistant professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the department of urban planning at UCLA. His expertise is in the topic of Life cycle Assessment (LCA), specifically in its application as a framework for informing energy, transportation, and environmental policy. With graduate degrees in both engineering and economics, and an inter-disciplinary Ph.D. in energy and resources from UC Berkeley, Rajagopal applies his multi-disciplinary expertise to improving LCA as a framework for environmental decision making. His focus on applications of LCA is on two emerging areas: the bioeconomy (specifically, focussed on waste-derived energy and bio-base jet fuels) and the sharing economy (specifically, focused on the rise of ride-hailing services).
ERIC FOURNIER
INSTITUTE OF THE ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY
Competition between efficiency and growth in the pursuit of residential energy conservation
Eric Daniel Fournier is a post-doctoral research fellow working at the California Center for Sustainable Communities at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. His research background is in the fields of spatial modeling, life cycle assessment, and energy and water systems analyses. Fournier works on interesting problems related to distributed renewable energy, as well as, water infrastructure and ecosystem services. He has extensive experience in the development computational methods for geographic optimization and geostatistical analyses. More generally however, he is interested in how information technology can be used to apply these types of quantitative methods towards the resolution of complex environmental problems.
JUAN MATUTE
URBAN PLANNING
Linking shared transportation network companies with Los Angeles Metro
Juan Matute studies the changing business of transportation in a carbon-constrained California, including the regulation and economics of innovative mobility services, public transportation strategy, and the GHG impacts of the transportation system. Juan seeks to serve as a translator between the worlds of academia and practice by focusing on “the last mile” of knowledge generation: ensuring that relevant, research-based information is available in accessible form to the right people when decisions are being made. He led UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies work on the 2012 and 2018 California Statewide Transit Strategic Plans and manages TransitWiki.org.
LAURENT PILON
MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING
A portfolio of energy technologies for a renewable energy future
Laurent Pilon received his Ph.D. from Purdue University and joined the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at UCLA in 2002. His research group is engaged in a wide range of interdisciplinary research projects at the intersection between interfacial and transport phenomena, material science, and biology for sustainable energy conversion, storage, and efficiency technologies. He is the recipient of the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the 2008 Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the 2009 Young Scientist Award in Radiative Transfer from Elsevier He is a Fellow of ASME.
RAJIT GADH
MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING
Cooperating microgrids via distributed energy resource (DER) combining solar photovoltaics, electric vehicles, and, battery energy storage systems – A modern framework for smart grids
Rajit Gadh is professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, the founder and director of the Smart Grid Energy Research Center (SMERC), and founder and director of the UCLA WINMEC Consortium. His current research interests include Smart Grids, Electric Vehicle to grid integration, vehicle to grid (V2G), autonomous electric vehicles, demand response, microgrids, energy storage in the grid, renewable integration, internet of things, and wireless/RFID. Dr. Gadh is also the author of more than 200 articles in journals and conference proceedings and 4 patents. His team has developed the WINSmartEV™ and WINSmartGrid™ research platforms at UCLA.
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He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He has received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, NSF Research Initiation Award, NSF-Lucent Industry Ecology Fellow Award, Society of Automotive Engineers Ralph R. Teetor Educational award, IEEE WTS second best student paper award, ASME Kodak Best Technical Paper award, AT&T Industrial ecology fellow award, Engineering Education Foundation Research Initiation Award, and the William Mong Fellowship from University of Hong Kong. Dr. Gadh serves as advisor to a handful of technology-based startups. He earned his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University.
RICHARD WIRZ
MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING
Energy Generation and Storage Requirements for a Sustainable LA by 2050
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SEAN KENNEDY
URBAN PLANNING
"Greening" the mix through community choice: Toward a 100% renewable energy Los Angeles
Sean Kennedy is a Ph.D. candidate and environmental policy professional with experience across public, private and nonprofit sectors, including policy and research positions at the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency in Canberra, Australia and the World Agroforestry Centre in Bogor, Indonesia.
Focused on California and Indonesia, Kennedy's dissertation research examines the political economy of the transition to renewable energy sources and its implications for community development and energy democracy.
TIMOTHY MALLOY
LAW
Agent-based modeling of solar power adoption by Los Angeles County residents
Timothy Malloy is a professor in the UCLA School of Law with a joint appointment at the Fielding School of Public Health and is the director of the Environmental Science and Engineering doctoral program at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Malloy's research interests focus on risk governance of chemicals and emerging materials and technologies, and on the application of organizational theory, decision analysis and modeling to policy. In addition, he has worked and written extensively in the area of prevention-based regulation. He is a member of the California Green Ribbon Science Panel, which provides advice to the state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control regarding implementation of the Safer Consumer Products program. He is also a member of the federal EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors.
RYAN HARRIGAN
INSTITUTE OF THE ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY
The Bird Genoscape Project
Dr. Harrigan’s main research interests include the evolutionary biology and ecology of species and species complexes, including infectious diseases. Separate and yet not mutually exclusive forces often contribute to the complex relationships we are witness to across the globe. Particular interesting are cases where additional anthropogenic forces are likely contributing to already complex natural processes. Increases in global transport, landuse conversion, and climate change all dramatically alter the way in which humans interact with infectious diseases, and understanding these changes is key to preventing epidemics. Dr. Harrigan’s current work is focused on how anthropogenic stressors have affected the spread of recently introduced, multi-host pathogens such as avian influenza and West Nile virus, and how migrant bird populations have been affected by such introductions.
YANG YANG
MATERIALS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
Recent progress of UCLA thin film solar cell research
Yang Yang is the Carol and Lawrence E. Tannas Jr. Chair Professor of materials science and engineering at UCLA. He is a materials physicist with expertise in the fields of organic electronics, organic/inorganic interface engineering, and the development and fabrication of related devices, such as photovoltaic cells, LEDs, and memory devices. His notable contributions to the field of organic photovoltaics (OPV) have enhanced the understanding of polymer morphology and its influence on device performance, the invention of the inverted organic solar cell, the inverted tandem solar cell, and transparent OPV devices. Recently, his group has entered the field of perovskite solar cell and has demonstrated power conversion efficiency by interface engineering and improved crystal growth process.
He is the American Physical Society fellow (2015); Materials Research Society (2015); Royal Society of Chemistry (2015); SPIE (2014) and the E-M Academy (2014). He was also recognized as “World's most influential scientific minds" by Thomason Reuters, 2016.
YIFANG ZHU
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH SCIENCES
Air pollution and its health effects in California: source apportionment and possible solution through deep decarbonization
Yifang Zhu is a professor in the environmental health sciences department at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. She graduated from Tsinghua University in 1997 and received her Ph.D. in environmental health sciences from UCLA in 2003. Her research interest are primarily in the fields of air pollution, environmental exposure assessment, and aerosol science and technology. Her current research focuses on measuring and modeling air pollutant emissions, transport, and transformation, as well as, assessing and mitigating the associated public health impacts. Her scholarship and creativity has been recognized by several national awards, including the Walter A. Rosenblith New Investigator Award from the Health Effects Institute in 2007, the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation in 2009, and the Haagen-Smit Prize from Atmosphere Environment in 2011. Zhu was appointed to California Air Resource Board’s Research Screening Committee in January 2014.
YONGJIE HU
MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING
Microscopic control of energy efficiency: iSLA system and beyond
Yongjie Hu is currently an Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, followed by a postdoc fellowship at MIT. He has received numerous honors including a 2018 NSF CAREER Award, a 2017 U.S. Air Force Young Investigator Award, and a 2017 ACS Doctoral New Investigator Award.