The energy systems community at Princeton

Below is a subset of the energy systems community at Princeton, which includes interested participants at Princeton University, as well as people at affiliated companies in the area. If you would like to join (and be added to the email list), send an email to powell@princeton.edu. Please put "Energy systems" in the subject heading.

Craig Arnold
Professor, Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering
Interests in energy systems span new battery technologies, and the design of heterogeneous portfolios of energy storage technologies.

V. Balaji
Princeton University Cooperative Institute of Climate Sciences jointly operated by the AOS Program in Geosciences and NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
My background is physics, and my interest is in climate science, with an emphasis on modeling and computation.
balaji@princeton.edu

Michael Coulon
Post-doctoral associate, Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering
Michael is a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer in ORFE. His main area of research is the application of financial mathematics to the modeling of commodity prices (mainly energy), and he has developed an undergraduate course on this topic. His primary interests include structural modeling of electricity spot and forward prices, understanding correlations between energy markets (gas, coal, power, and carbon emissions) and the pricing and hedging of options, other financial contracts or physical assets. Other interests include strategic bidding in power markets, the impact of storage and renewables, smart-grids and market interconnectors, and the design of emissions trading schemes.

Boris Defourny
Research staff, Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering
Boris is an expert in stochastic optimization and machine learning, but is also very knowledgeable in power grid modeling and energy markets, having done an internship in a French RTO.

Christopher Floudas
Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Prof. Floudas interests in energy systems include the develop of novel processes for coal, biomass and natural gas for satisfying transportation demand, the scheduling of crude oil operations, and the design of efficient distribution networks for alternative fuels.

Tom Kreutz
Energy systems modeler, Princeton Environmental Institute
Tom is an expert in alternative energy sources, generation of Fischer-Tropsch fuels from coal and biomass, carbon sequestration and the use of hydrogen as an alternative fuel technology.

Eric Larson
Research engineering, Princeton Environmental Institute
Dr. Larson is an expert in energy economics, with expertise in alternative energy technologies, including biomass power generation, coal liquifaction, co-production of synfuels and electricity from coal and biomass, and Fischer-Tropsch fuels.

Margaret Martonosi

Professor, Department of Computer Science
Margaret is an expert in the efficient use of computing resources, and is interested in the general area of Green IT.

Somayeh Moazeni
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Dept of Operations Research and Financial Engineering Princeton University
Research Interests: Optimization under uncertainty in particular robust optimization and stochastic programming, Financial Risk Management and Portfolio Optimization, Convex Optimization with Applications in Communication and Energy systems.
Email address: somayeh@princeton.edu

Tom Nyquist
Director, Facilities Planning at Princeton University
Interests are in finding energy related technologies that can be tested on our campus (campus as a laboratory) or applied to some area of our energy infrastructure. These technologies can help us to meet our current or future carbon emission goals. Also, understanding how markets can be shaped to encourage the development of renewable or clean power.

H. Vincent Poor
Professor and Dean, School of Engineering and Applied Science
Princeton University/Electrical Engineering
Smart grid interests include: privacy; distributed state estimation and control; security (bad data detection, protection and recovery); game theoretic modeling; scheduling & pricing.
email address: poor@princeton.edu
web site: www.princeton.edu/poor

Pascale Maloof Poussart
Assistant Director, Energy Initiatives, Princeton Environmental Institute
Pascale Poussart joined PEI in 2008 after being an associate research scholar in the Department of Geosciences since 2006. She administers the Carbon Mitigation Initiative and Siebel Energy Challenge programs and her responsibilities include working with faculty and students to develop research and education initiatives around energy and climate, developing program websites and planning and coordinating seminar series, workshops and meetings. Pascale holds a Ph.D. in geochemistry from Harvard University.
poussart@princeton.edu

Warren B. Powell
Professor, Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering
Stochastic optimization in energy systems, spanning storage devices in the presence of intermittent energy, energy investment policies, demand response, power grid modeling, dynamic pricing and climate change. Expertise in approximate dynamic programming and optimal learning (efficient collection of information), as well as statistics and machine learning.
powell@princeton.edu
http://energysystems.princeton.edu
see also
http://www.castlelab.princeton.edu

Daniel Salas
Graduate student, Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering
Interested in approximate dynamic programming for the optimal control of portfolios of storage devices.
E-mail: dsalas@princeton.edu

Hugo P. Simao
Deputy director of PENSA, Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering
Development and implementation of approximate dynamic programming in transportation and energy. Oversees projects spanning power grid modeling, energy investment, electric vehicles and dynamic pricing.

Ronnie Sircar
Professor, Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering
Game-theoretic analyses of the energy/emissions markets with emphasis on policy implications; economics of exhaustible resources, including modeling of shifts in energy markets toward more expensive alternative sources such as solar; dynamic games models to help design incentives for greener energy production; financialization of energy and commodities markets; interplay between power and emissions markets.

Robert Socolow
Professor, Process of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering
Socolow's current research focuses on the characteristics of a global energy system responsive to global and local environmental and security constraints. His specific areas of interest include global carbon management, carbon dioxide capture from fossil fuels and storage in geological formations, nuclear power, energy efficiency in buildings, and the acceleration of deployment of advanced technologies in developing countries.

Howard A. Stone
Professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Research group works broadly in fluid mechanics, including experiments, theory and modeling. Interests overlap applied mathematics. On-going research projects on microbial fuel cells, thin film flow of potential relevance to plasma-facing components for fusion reactors, and various transport processes of relevance to energy systems.
hastone@princeton.edu
http://www.princeton.edu/~stonelab/

Robert Williams
Senior research scientist, Princeton Environmental Institute
Dr. Williams is an expert in the economics of novel energy technologies, including Fischer-Tropsch fuels, biomass, carbon sequestration and compressed air storage.