Wamburu ‘22PhD Receives ACM SIGEnergy Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention
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John Wamburu ’22PhD, an alumnus of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, received the Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Energy (SIGEnergy) at the organization’s recent e-Energy ’24 conference in Singapore. He was honored for his research exploring how data-driven modeling and analytics applied to energy use data can facilitate optimal carbon reduction in the energy transition.
“John's thesis looks at how to do grid optimizations in an equitable fashion,” says Shenoy. “People are putting solar panels on their rooftops, deploying energy storage batteries, replacing their old furnaces with more efficient heat pumps. These all make for greener, more efficient homes—but they all cost money, and not everyone can afford to participate.”
In response to this dynamic, Wamburu asks: how can we ensure that green technologies get deployed and distributed equitably so that everyone in our society benefits from them, rather than just the wealthy?
The four studies included in his dissertation examined the impact of residential electric vehicles on the grid, the feasibility of integrating electric bikes to help green ride-sharing networks, the potential of using electric heat pumps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by replacing gas heating, and approaches to correct inequities in the energy transition to clean energy.
In his look at the deployment of electric heat pumps to replace gas heating, Wamburu found that standard approaches to prioritizing homes risked placing the biggest homes owned by the wealthiest people ahead of those who suffer most from high energy prices. To address this inequity, he developed metrics allowing heat pump deployments to consider a broader range of homes.
After graduating from CICS, Wamburu joined IBM Research in Nairobi, Kenya, where he works as a research scientist. He is an alumnus of the college’s Laboratory for Advanced System Software, directed by Distinguished Professor Prashant Shenoy, which operates with the goal of learning to use computing technology to green our infrastructure and reduce carbon emissions while aiming towards a more just society.