Yunus Kinkhabwala, PhD, develops sophisticated data-driven models to guide decision making and policy. Projects include optimizing the geospatial siting of solar and storage resilience hubs for vulnerable populations; incorporating societal costs and benefits into the economic modeling of hourly electric generation models; and estimating detailed household energy usages and costs to investigate impacts of policy scenarios aimed at improving energy affordability for low-income households.

Dr. Kinkhabwala received his PhD in Applied Physics from Cornell University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow where he developed methods inspired by statistical physics to forecast small area demographic changes. Prior to his PhD, Dr. Kinkhabwala taught secondary math and science at schools in Austin, TX and Dakar, Senegal; served as a U.S. Peace Corps Education and HIV/AIDS outreach volunteer in South Africa; and earned his BS in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Elena Krieger, PhD, is Senior Director of Research and Policy at Just Solutions, a national nonprofit focused on equitable energy and climate solutions. Previously, she served as director of research at an interdisciplinary energy science and policy research institute, where she explored strategies to integrate public health, equity, affordability, resilience, and other societal benefits into energy transitions. She is a member of the second cohort of New Voices at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and a member of the Disadvantaged Communities Advisory Group to the California Energy Commission and California Public Utilities Commission. Elena received her BA in Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics from Harvard and her PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, where her research focused on optimizing energy storage for renewable energy systems.