This year's Summer Summit is co-led by Irving Institute team members Dr. Sarah Kelly, Program Manager for the Energy Justice Clinic and Lecturer in Geography. and Dr. Megan Litwhiler, Manager of Academic Initiatives.
We are delighted to welcome Ekundayo Shittu, Associate Professor of Engineering and Chair of the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at George Washington University, to this year's New Energy Summer Summit. Professor Shittu will give the summit keynote talk, "Charting My Career Path in Sustainability Research: Experiences, Lessons, and Reverse-Engineering the Academic Journey."
About the Talk
There are three integrated parts to this talk. The first part tells a story about Professor Shittu's career path, including the challenges, failures, and successes that he encountered in building my research and teaching practice. Secondly, he will dwell on aspects of recent interdisciplinary scholarship and community-engaged research within the sustainability transitions framework. A catalyst for investment is the efficacy of different energy portfolios on decarbonization in the presence of emission-reducing policies. Yet, panel data on utilities in the U.S. underscore how the effects of competition and regulatory policy on new technology investments depend on a firm's existing resource stock. For instance, contrasting transaction costs with capability considerations sheds light on the make-or-buy decisions in the wind energy industry by focusing on organizational alternatives, the arrangement that best mitigates contractual hazards and leverages supply-side market capabilities. The aim is to synthesize the options that unpack the social-economic impacts of investment allocation. To unveil the interactions between the technologies, policies, and economics in terms of power systems resilience, focus then shifts to reconfiguration approaches to determining the optimal storage capacity for offshore wind farms. The result validates the contributions of integrated systems in resilience enhancement. The third and final part of this talk focuses on reverse-engineering the paths to a successful academic career.
About Enkundayo Shittu
Ekundayo Shittu is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at GW's School of Engineering and Applied Science. He directs the Systems Modeling Laboratory for Economic Decisions (SysMoLED), where he teams up with his students and collaborators to study the strategic interaction between firms' technology stocks and the external environment with the aid of mathematical programming, and through the lenses of transaction cost economics and the resource-based view. His research has been supported by multiple awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF), including the prestigious Early Faculty Development CAREER grant, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Kern Family Foundation, Duke Energy Renewables, Toyota Mobility Foundation, etc., totaling more than $12 million. He was a Lead Author on Chapter 2, "Integrated Risk and Uncertainty Assessment of Climate Change Response Policies," of Working Group III to the 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He co-edited Renewable Energy: International Perspectives on Sustainability (Springer). His foray into healthcare has led two patents to improve patient safety through condition-based maintenance of biomedical assets.
Melody Brown Burkins, Dartmouth College
Genevieve Byrne, Vermont Law and Graduate School
Sol Diamond, Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College
Meredith Kelly, Dartmouth College
Sarah Kelly, Dartmouth College
Justin Mankin, Dartmouth College
Jörg Matschullat, Dartmouth College
Bindu Panikkar, University of Vermont
David Sittenfeld, Museum of Science, Boston
Chris Sneddon, Dartmouth College