2026 New Energy Summer Summit Cohort

amma-agyekum-500x500.jpg

Amma Kyewaa Agyekum is a PhD candidate in Civil Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on transportation infrastructure resilience, reliability, and decision support, with an emphasis on how disruptions and emergencies affect access to essential services and how agencies can better identify and prioritize critical assets. She uses computational and network-based methods that integrate reliability and accessibility to assess infrastructure vulnerabilities and support data-driven planning and policy decisions. Her work includes applications such as resilience hub planning for access to powered destinations during outages and network-based infrastructure prioritization.

bayu-ahmad-500x500.jpg

Bayu Ahmad is a fifth-year PhD candidate in chemistry at Cornell University, where his doctoral research focuses on developing novel chemical reactivities as energy-efficient pathways for chemical purification. In doing so, he leverages various emerging synthetic chemistry platforms, such as porous solids, photochemistry, and electrochemistry. These include his work on (sun)light-driven carbon dioxide capture from emission streams and electricity-driven separation of commodity chemical feedstock. To explore the real-world viability of his technologies, Bayu has engaged with entrepreneurship and sustainability programs at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, including the Green Technology Innovation Fellowship, the Semlitz Family Sustainability Fellowship, and the Atkinson Graduate Research Grant. These experiences have sharpened his ability to develop sustainable innovations that bridge fundamental science with practical application. Upon completing his degree, Bayu plans to complement his doctoral work in chemical purification with postdoctoral research in synthetic biology-based chemical production, with a vision of an independent research program that synergizes both disciplines as a next-generation platform for sustainable chemical manufacturing.

yoojung-ahn-500x500.jpg

Yoonjung Ahn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography & Atmospheric Science at the University of Kansas. Her research examines how climate hazards, built environments, and social vulnerability intersect to shape human health and well-being. Trained as a health and medical geographer and geospatial information scientist, she uses spatial modeling, big data, and quantitative methods to study extreme heat, access to air conditioning, indoor environmental conditions, power outages, air pollution, and climate-related health disparities. Her broader goal is to understand energy access and vulnerability as outcomes of social behavior, residential environments, and broader contextual conditions, and to generate evidence that can guide climate adaptation, public health planning, and energy resilience efforts. Her recent work includes developing national datasets on residential air conditioning prevalence and examining energy vulnerability among older adults and residents of manufactured housing. Before joining KU, she was a postdoctoral associate at the University of Colorado Boulder and a researcher at the Korea Environment Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from Florida State University.

thein-kim-bui-500x500.jpg

Thien-Kim Bui is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the School of Earth, Environment and Society's geography academic area and a senior fellow at the Hatfield School of Government's National Policy Consensus Center at Portland State University. A USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture predoctoral fellow, their research pairs legal and policy analyses with human ecology mapping to elicit the cultural and landscape values that animate conflicts and collaborations at the water-energy nexus in the Pacific Northwest. Thien-Kim earned a BA in Classics from Reed College.

thomas-familia-500x500.jpg

Thomas Familia is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar with the Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment at Arizona State University. He spent over a decade in Oregon's electric utility industry, first as a long-term energy forecaster for a private utility company and later as an energy resource planning representative for the Oregon Public Utility Commission. His research focuses on how cleaner, more decentralized electricity systems are reshaping governance, public participation, and accountability. He studies how households and communities engage with distributed energy and demand response, how automation can improve routine grid performance while creating new challenges for trust and institutional responsiveness, and how legal and institutional arrangements shape what kinds of collective energy action are possible. In comparative work on energy communities in Europe and related arrangements in the United States, he examines how laws and public institutions make some forms of community participation, benefit-sharing, and local influence more durable than others.

xavier-farrell-500x500.jpg

Xavier Farrell is a fifth-year PhD student in Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research examines consumer energy security from multiple angles—community-level and systems-level alike. In Detroit, he has studied support models that help low-to-moderate income residents reduce their energy burden. Additionally, he studies how the utility's design of consumer electricity rate plans can create financial risk for low-to-moderate income residents. At the grid scale, he investigates how power-outage severity affects health outcomes among older adults, with the goal of integrating health costs into power-system planning. Across his work, he directs his research toward helping vulnerable populations achieve the energy security they need for a high quality of life.

sahir-ganti-agrawal-500x500.jpg

Saahir Ganti-Agrawal is currently a 3rd-year PhD candidate at MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, co-advised by Professor Yet-Ming Chiang and Professor W. Craig Carter. His research focuses on using sodium-air and lithium-air electrochemistry to enable regional electric aviation and shipping, which both require high energy densities that are not possible with lithium-ion batteries. He is passionate about clean energy technologies and using technoeconomics to guide technology development.

summit-headshot-mel-george.jpg

Mel is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Maryland's Center for Global Sustainability, where he leads integrated assessment modeling for the NGFS and directs high-emissions marker scenario development for CMIP7/ScenarioMIP. His research focuses on equity and distributional impacts in climate mitigation pathways, and he supports U.S. climate diplomacy through the Country Climate Ambition Program. Before his PhD, he spent nearly a decade in industrial R&D management and government energy policy in India, including wind integration and petroleum sector roles.

stacy-godfreey-igwe-500-500.jpg

Stacy Godfreey-Igwe is a PhD student in the joint Engineering & Public Policy and Civil & Environmental Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). As a CMU Rales Fellow, her research examines disparities in residential energy demand under extreme heat conditions, and focuses on how energy affordability constraints can shape household cooling behavior. She is broadly interested in energy equity, grid reliability, and through previous science policy work experience, translating technical research into actionable policy recommendations for climate-vulnerable communities. 

mehrnush-golriz-500x500.jpg

Mehrnush Golriz is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research lies at the intersection of legal geography and critical resource geographies, examining how laws shape and are contested in the governance of critical minerals within the global energy transition. Focusing on lithium extraction in Chile's Atacama Salt Flats, she traces how lithium's historical classification as a strategic resource continues to structure contemporary governance amid rapidly expanding demand for lithium-ion batteries. She analyzes how national security, mining, environmental, and Indigenous legal frameworks intersect to produce fragmented regulatory regimes, how environmental law has become a key site of contestation over extraction, and how Indigenous communities navigate and contest these legal frameworks. She holds an M.A. in Geography from UCLA and a B.A. in Geography and Hispanic Studies from Dartmouth College.

sarah-greene-500x500.jpg

Sarah Greene (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on energy and transportation transitions, with particular attention to how fossil fuel–dependent jurisdictions navigate economic development amid intensifying climate pressures. With over five years of international experience, Sarah has worked with leading think tanks to develop policy solutions advancing sustainable resource management, equitable economies, and inclusive transitions. She previously held a leadership role at General Motors of Canada, where she led product launches, established cross-departmental processes, and oversaw pilot initiatives, bringing practical insight into the automotive sector and labour policy. Her current research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), examines why some governments continue to expand oil production despite global decarbonization efforts. Outside of her doctoral work, Sarah is completing French language training at Durham College. She holds a Master's degree in International Public Policy from the Balsillie School of International Affairs and a B.A. in Ethics, Society, and Law from the University of Toronto.

lior-hamovitz-500x500.jpg

Lior Hamovitz is a Political Science PhD candidate at Boston University and CSSN Scholar, specializing in Political Theory. Her interests are research centers on understanding environmental injustices through the lenses of kinship and loss. Specifically, this research explores how relational ontologies and Andean cosmovisions may inform a more profound view of kinship that could transform our ability to grieve ecological losses and in turn act to mitigate them.

patricia-henegan-500x500.jpg

Patricia Henegan is a third-year PhD candidate in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's Department of Environmental Health Sciences in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences(SPHHS) , working in Dr. Richard Peltier's laboratory. She received her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Susquehanna University and her MPH from George Washington University. She is a recipient of SPHHS Dean's Fellowship, Elaine Briggs Internship, and the ELEVATE Fellowship. Her research focuses on exposure assessment and environmental epidemiology, with a specialization in PM₂.₅ chemical speciation from industrial and residential wood fuel burning in the context of the energy transition. Through her work, Patricia aims to better characterize air pollution sources, inform mitigation strategies, and address the disproportionate impacts of air pollution and climate change on vulnerable populations.

alexander-kuptel-500x500.jpg

Alexander Kuptel is a Ph.D. student in the System Dynamics Group in the MIT Sloan School of Management advised by Prof. John Sterman. His work studies green technology and its interactions with the electric grid and workforce development. Before coming to MIT, he earned a BA in Economics and Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame.

ryan-mccord-2026-500x500.jpg

Ryan is a recent PhD graduate in Environmental Policy (Economics concentration) from Duke University, studying energy and development. Her research examines how energy systems shape outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, with a focus on identifying which dimensions of electricity service (i.e., reliability, affordability, capacity, etc.) are most important for translating access into improvements in health and economic well-being in different settings. She also examines how electrification programs and policies are structured, implemented, and evaluated, with the goal of identifying approaches that maximize the benefits of improved electricity services. Ryan has extensive fieldwork experience, particularly in East and Southern Africa, and more recently, in South Asia. She cares deeply about research that is rigorous, grounded in real-world contexts, and useful to the people and institutions she works with.

mercy-muganyizi-500x500.jpg

Mercy Muganyizi is a fourth-year PhD student in the department of architectural engineering and has a minor in African studies at Penn State University. Her work sits at the intersection between climate change and how green infrastructure can be instrumental in mitigating heat stress while offering other co-benefits, such as improving the well-being of the inhabitants, as well as increasing the land value of the neighborhoods. Specifically, her work seeks to explore the role of vegetation in improving outdoor thermal comfort in multifamily housing schemes in rapidly urbanizing settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Trained as an architect, Mercy brings nearly a decade of experience working as teaching faculty at Ardhi University in Tanzania, where she was vastly involved in mentoring undergraduates in design-related courses in the departments of architecture and interior design. At Penn State, she has worked as a graduate teaching assistant for EDSGN 100-Cornerstone Engineering Design, an entry-level engineering class that introduces students to the basics of the engineering design process.

tali-neesham-mctiernan-500x500.jpg

Talitha H. Neesham-McTiernan is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography, Development and Environment at the University of Arizona, where she studies how solar energy infrastructure can be deployed in ways that strengthen, rather than displace, the farmland and farming communities it shares space with. Her research focuses on agrivoltaics, the practice of growing crops beneath or between solar panels, as a practical response to the pressures a changing climate places on agriculture, asking whether one intervention can simultaneously advance renewable energy, sustain food production, and protect farmworkers from increasingly dangerous heat. Working across field sites in Arizona and Colorado, her dissertation moves between large-scale spatial modeling, on-farm microclimate measurement and farmworker interviews, and laboratory crop nutritional analysis, because sustaining agriculture under a changing climate is at once a question of land, of livelihoods, and of the health of the people who work it.

mark-ortiz-500x500.jpg

Mark Ortiz is an Assistant Professor of Geography and faculty member within the Institute of Energy and the Environment and Social Science Research Institute at Penn State University. He is a human geographer with research interests spanning youth climate and environmental politics, social movement studies, global climate policy, environmental justice in the U.S. Southeast, multimedia storytelling, and creative geographies. His current research examines environmental injustice in Birmingham, Alabama and North Carolina through qualitative, creative, and community-engaged methodologies. Mark is the Creator and Director of the STAGES Lab (Storytelling across Generations, Environments, and Societies) at Penn State, a platform that aims to foster multigenerational environmental research, education, storytelling, and policy-facing work. Mark has been active as a researcher and contributor in international climate policy processes, including the United Nations international climate negotiations, where he has spoken on panels related to intergenerational inclusion and studied the role of youth engagement in shaping international policy outcomes. His research appears in Climate and Development, GeoHumanities, Children's Geographies, cultural geographies, and Annals of the American Association of Geographers among other academic and public venues.

weijie-pan-500x500.jpg

Weijie Pan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Irving Institute for Energy and Society at Dartmouth College, with a background in systems engineering and electrical engineering. His research focuses on interdisciplinary studies of integrated energy systems in the era of energy transition, spanning power systems, healthcare, and transportation. His work explores the interactions among energy policies, markets, human engagement, and the integration of advanced technologies in power and energy systems. His expertise includes macro-energy systems modeling, mathematical optimization, system simulation, and life cycle assessment, with ongoing aims to understand how each component of complex energy systems can contribute to more sustainable and resilient planning and operations.

popeli-500x500.jpg

Melissa Popeil is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Advanced Energy Systems program at Colorado School of Mines conducting research in collaboration with the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR). Her research focuses on the sustainable recycling of lithium-ion batteries, where she pairs her electrochemical experimentation and advanced imaging with insights from modeling partners to optimize hybrid cathodes for both performance and cost. Passionate about interdisciplinary collaboration and global energy solutions, she aims to bridge the gap between bench-scale materials science and industry-ready manufacturing to accelerate the clean energy transition.

niloofar-pourghaderi-500x500.jpg

Dr. Niloofar Pourghaderi is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the George Washington University. She received her B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology in 2015 and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Power Systems) from Sharif University of Technology in 2017 and 2023, respectively. She was a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick in 2024 and has held instructional roles at Isfahan University of Technology, Amirkabir University of Technology, and George Washington University. Her research focuses on applying mathematical optimization and AI to power system operation and planning, with an emphasis on renewable energy integration, energy storage systems, and electricity market analysis.

afshan-qamar-500x500.jpg

Afshan Qamar is a Fulbright Ph.D. candidate at the Energy and Efficiency Institute, University of California, Davis. She is also a Graduate Student Researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she develops advanced control methods for grid-interactive buildings to improve energy efficiency, enable demand response, and support low-power electrification in the built environment. Her research focuses on automating and optimizing flexible building loads, while integrating clean energy resources and on-site storage to reduce energy costs and emissions. Prior to UC Davis, Afshan worked with USAID in Pakistan on small-scale renewable energy projects to electrify remote communities. She holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering.

rodrigo-retamal-500x500.jpg

Dr.-Ing. Rodrigo R. Retamal Marín is a postdoctoral researcher and habilitation candidate at TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany, affiliated with the Chair of Gas and Heat Technology. He studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Talca, Chile, and earned his doctorate from TU Dresden in 2021. His research focuses on the development of spectroscopic methods and gas sensor technologies for offline, at-line, online, and in-situ measurements under complex and dynamic conditions. His technical expertise spans nanoparticle characterization, electrokinetic analysis of colloidal systems, and process-integrated diagnostics. He has extensive experience in energy-transition–related gas analysis, including hydrogen combustion systems, biogas processes, and exhaust gas monitoring. He is also the founder of DualPhase Monitoring, a spin-off developing dual-sensor in-situ dissolved gas measurement technology for biogas fermentation. His work bridges fundamental measurement science and applied engineering, translating advanced diagnostics into robust solutions for industrial decarbonization.

dan-sambor-500x500.jpg

My research focuses on optimization of food-energy-water infrastructure at the local-scale tailored to the specific needs and services of a rural community using a systems approach. The goal of the research is to provide a holistic framework for community members to reduce energy costs, improve comfort, and achieve resilience that is based first on appropriate energy systems with user needs at the forefront. I design energy efficiency retrofits and develop models of buildings and energy infrastructure in order to recommend the optimal size of technologies, such as heat pumps, energy storage, and solar photovoltaics, that can more affordably power specific community needs like building heating/cooling/hot water, water treatment, and local small-scale agriculture. I am collaborating with social scientists to determine how to best tailor solutions to the community by analyzing successes and failures of previous solutions in order to achieve broader impact in the US. 

ben-sanchez-500-500.jpg

Dr. Benjamin Sanchez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sustainable Technology and Built Environment at Appalachian State University and a Senior Researcher in the Circular Future Cities research module of the Future Cities Laboratory Global at ETH Zurich. His research focuses on the development and implementation of emerging digital technologies, including Building Information Modeling (BIM), Digital Twins, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and 3D Scan-to-BIM, for advancing sustainability and Circular Economy practices in the built environment. His work examines how data-driven and automated approaches can improve the environmental performance, adaptability, and resource efficiency of buildings and infrastructure systems. Dr. Sanchez has contributed to research on the valuation and monetization of environmental impacts associated with the residual life of building stock in North America, integrating Life Cycle Assessment into decision-making processes for adaptive reuse and selective disassembly. His research aims to support decarbonization strategies, reduce construction waste, and mitigate CO₂ emissions through Circular Economy approaches in construction. He has participated in international research collaborations and academic exchanges at ETH Zurich, Singapore ETH Centre, and Chalmers University of Technology, and has presented his work at international conferences including ISARC, CIB WBC, ASCE, and CSCE. He has also collaborated with organizations such as the Energy Council of Canada, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP23. Dr. Sanchez holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

alaa-selim-500x500.jpg

Alaa Selim is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering. He develops trustworthy grid-intelligence methods that combine power systems, control, optimization, and artificial intelligence to support resilient and secure energy infrastructure. His research centers on active distribution networks, microgrids, distributed energy resources, critical facilities, and grid-interactive data centers, with a focus on how these systems can operate safely during outages, cyber-physical disruptions, extreme events, and high-renewable operating conditions. His current work advances agentic AI for operator decision support, data centers as flexible grid assets, and the Patient-to-Power (P2P) Protocol, a surge-coupled framework for critical-facility energy management during compound outage events. He aims to advance practical, auditable, and human-centered energy-management frameworks that improve reliability, resilience, and community impact during the clean energy transition. He is a recipient of the Sikorsky Fellowship, the Future Climate Venture Fellowship, and the Eversource Energy Fellowship; his work has also been recognized with the Best Research Award at IEEE PES Grid Edge 2025, the Best Poster Award at the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2025, and the Best Paper Award at IEEE PES General Meeting 2025.

pavithra-selvakumar-500x500.jpg

Pavi Selvakumar is postdoctoral research scientist at the Columbia Climate School, she is exploring how artificial intelligence and climate justice can be integrated to support equitable resilience planning in frontline communities. She is an environmental social scientist interested in how communities navigate sustainability, environmental justice, and resilience in the face of today's climate challenges. During her Ph.D., she also worked as a Graduate Research Assistant with the Social Dynamics team of the NSF EPSCoR S3OK project, collaborating with an interdisciplinary group of researchers to address wicked environmental problems facing the state. Pavi holds a bachelor's degree in Information Technology from India and a master's degree in Environmental Assessment and Management from the United Kingdom. Her interdisciplinary background drives a research approach that combines technical fluency with a strong foundation in environmental policy and social inquiry.

gad-sezirahiga-500x500.jpg

Gad Sezirahiga is an emerging energy scholar whose work is profoundly shaped by his unconventional upbringing in a refugee camp, where he arrived at age seven and spent two decades living with unreliable and limited energy access. Those early experiences forged his lifelong commitment to building fair, resilient, and community‑centered energy systems. Now based in Phoenix, Arizona, Gad works at the intersection of engineering, policy, and global development. Before beginning his doctoral studies, he spent several years in field engineering and drilling operations with Schlumberger, Hawkeye Directional, and Patterson UTI—hands‑on roles that grounded his understanding of energy systems from the subsurface to the grid. Gad is currently pursuing a PhD in Innovation in Global Development at Arizona State University, focusing on energy security and energy futures. He holds master's and bachelor's degrees in Energy & Petroleum Engineering from the University of Wyoming and a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Rwanda.

wasi-uddin-500x500.jpg

Wasi Uddin is a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. His research focuses on additive manufacturing, laser processing, and laser–material interactions for high-performance engineering materials. He uses advanced materials characterization, computational fluid dynamics, and heat-transfer modeling to study how processing conditions influence melt-pool behavior, microstructure, defect formation, and material performance. Wasi is especially interested in how manufacturing can support more reliable, efficient, and sustainable production of components for next-generation energy systems. His work aims to improve the scalability and performance of advanced manufacturing technologies for demanding energy and engineering applications.

lilly-yang-500x500.jpg

Lilly Yang is a Ph.D. candidate at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on optimal sustainable network designs, particularly in the areas of energy transitions in fragile states aligned with UN decarbonization goals and food waste management for climate mitigation.

The mission of the New Energy Summer Summit is to increase the capacity of early-stage energy and climate researchers to accelerate transitions to equitable and sustainable energy systems and a healthy climate via interdisciplinary scholarship and collaboration.