I am the Trustee Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. I grew up in Medellín, Colombia, and hold a B.S. from Florida International University (2003) and an M.S. (2004) and Ph.D. (2007) from Carnegie Mellon, both in Civil and Environmental Engineering.
My career has been an evolving effort to connect the technical modeling of energy systems to the policy and equity questions those systems raise, with growing geographic, methodological, and institutional ambition along the way.
My earliest work focused on process-based life-cycle assessment of fossil energy systems, including foundational analyses of the climate footprints of coal and natural gas supply chains in the United States. What mattered as much as the findings was the methodological rigor: at the time, life-cycle assessment of energy systems was often incomplete in its delineation of system boundaries.
My first major pivot came through CMU's RenewElec project, starting in 2010. Working on it, I came to see that the operational constraints of the power system, including dispatch orders, transmission limits, and storage dynamics, fundamentally shape the environmental outcomes of energy investments. That insight led me to develop methods for consequential life-cycle assessment that embed power system optimization models within life-cycle frameworks. Using this integrated approach, my group has evaluated the marginal emissions consequences of electric vehicles, wind power, energy storage, and large hydropower, and has helped change how researchers attribute environmental impacts in interconnected electricity grids.
A second expansion came in 2014, when I turned toward energy systems in the Global South, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, I co-founded the e-GUIDE Initiative, a multi-institutional collaboration focused on a surprisingly understudied problem: electricity demand in newly electrifying communities is poorly understood, making conventional planning tools unreliable. My group applied data science and machine learning to demand prediction in energy-poor economies, work with direct implications for utility business models and infrastructure investment in places where both over-building and under-building carry severe consequences. This research deepened through the AfriqAir network, which deployed hybrid air-quality monitoring across African countries. My AfriqAir collaborations examine the links between unreliable electricity supply, growing transportation-sector emissions, and local air pollution exposure.
Throughout, I have kept a parallel commitment to the modeling infrastructure itself. I co-direct the Open Energy Outlook Initiative, which develops the Temoa capacity expansion model as an open-source, fully documented alternative to proprietary tools, including those underpinning the EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook. The initiative reflects my conviction that the assumptions embedded in energy models, such as technology costs, policy constraints, and discount rates, are themselves policy-relevant choices that should be transparent and contestable.
More recently, I have turned to the institutional and regulatory dimensions of the energy transition. My 2024 to 2025 AAAS Congressional Fellowship in the office of Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández gave me direct experience with legislative drafting on energy issues. Since then, I have pursued research on NEPA environmental review processes, generation interconnection queue delays, and the adequacy of federal electricity governance frameworks, topics where engineering modeling meets administrative law and regulatory design. This follows a pattern that has shaped my whole career: identify the binding constraints on energy system outcomes, then expand my toolkit to address them, even when those constraints turn out to be institutional rather than technical.
My work has been cited more than 12,500 times. I was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020), a Coordinating Lead Author for the Transportation chapter of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (Working Group III, 2019 to 2022), a member of the National Academies Roundtable on Macroeconomic and Climate-Related Risks and Opportunities (2023 to 2024), and an ELATES Fellow (2024). I hold a courtesy appointment at CMU Africa and am a research affiliate of the Kigali Collaborative Research Center. My research has been funded by NSF, DOE, NOAA, the Sloan Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others.
Through my Substack newsletter, Amped Up, and regular engagement with journalists and policymakers, I have increasingly worked as a public academic: someone who not only produces research but also actively translates it for legislative, regulatory, and public audiences. Bridging the research-policy gap is as central to how I see my work as any single line of scholarship.