I am a tenure-track Presidential Fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the National University of Singapore.
My research focuses on energy and climate policy that combines engineering-based modeling with policy and economic analysis. Current research areas include clean energy transition and net-zero energy systems, technology innovation, and climate change impacts. My research has been published in leading journals including Nature, Nature Energy, and Environmental Science & Technology, and has been covered by The New York Times, The Economist, and other international media outlets. Before joining NUS, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. I did my Ph.D. in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy at Princeton University and got my bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science from Beijing Normal University.
A bit about my personal academic journey: I didn’t actually choose environmental science for undergrad. Back in high school, I aspired to be a social scientist or a historian of ancient China. But I was assigned to environmental science after the college entrance exam (gaokao). I tried working in wet labs but I was very bad at experiments. It was when I started research in industrial ecology and environmental policy that something clicked, and I realized I could combine public policy with engineering-style research. So I pursued my Ph.D. and did my postdoc at the public policy schools at Princeton and Harvard. At NUS, my lab aims to bridge the gap between engineers and policy/economic analysts, and train the next generation of energy scientists and environmentalists with system thinking across disciplines to address the grand global challenges of sustainability.