When you picture MIT doctoral students taking small PhD courses together, you probably don’t imagine them going on class field trips. But it does happen, sometimes, and one of those trips changed Andy Sun’s career.
When you picture MIT doctoral students taking small PhD courses together, you probably don’t imagine them going on class field trips. But it does happen, sometimes, and one of those trips changed Andy Sun’s career.
Today, Sun is a faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a leading global expert on integrating renewable energy into the electric grid. Back in 2007, Sun was an operations research PhD candidate with a diversified academic background: He had studied electrical engineering, quantum computing, and analog computing but was still searching for a doctoral research subject involving energy.
One day, as part of a graduate energy class taught by visiting professor Ignacio J. Pérez Arriaga, the students visited the headquarters of ISO-New England, the organization that operates New England’s entire power grid and wholesale electricity market. Suddenly, it hit Sun. His understanding of engineering, used to design and optimize computing systems, could be applied to the grid as a whole, with all its connections, circuitry, and need for efficiency.
Read more at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image by Scott from Pixabay
