CE-CERT is proud to announce the recipients of the 2022-2023 Scholarship Awards totaling $39,500. We would like to congratulate them on their hard work and thank our generous donors who made these awards possible.
Colin E. Hackett Graduate Award Recipient
Jacqueline Garrido
Electrical Engineering
Jacqueline recently presented at the 2021 ITSC conference in Indianapolis on her carbon-based pricing strategy and pattern recognition predictions that consider CO2 emission rates from the grid, Carbon Allowance Prices (CAP), Time-of-Use rates (TOU), building power usage, and renewable energy generation. She and her team are also planning to embed the carbon-based pricing forecast into the level 2 EV chargers located at CE-CERT to test this pricing strategy. Their goal would be to measure the response and changes in charging behavior from the drivers by studying their willingness to pay.
Esther F. Hays Graduate Fellowship Recipients
Ryan Drover
Chemical & Environmental Engineering
As a Ph.D. student at UCR, Ryan have worked on collaborative health exposure studies with the UCR School of Medicine (SoM) and the multidisciplinary BREATHE Center, with Dr. Miller in marine emissions, and with Dr. Cocker and Carter in the Atmospheric Processes Lab on the ozone formation potential of industrial chemicals. Educating the public on the mechanisms of working towards better outcomes is Ryan’s passion. He is confident that these programs will provide him with structured training to engage between science and policy while he is able to leverage the academic environment while at UCR.
Sahar Ghadimi
Chemical & Environmental Engineering
Sahar and her team are currently investigating the physiochemical properties of primary and secondary emissions of several in-use heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) in a 30 m3 mobile atmospheric chamber. She and her team are also investigating the SOA yield from a-pinene precursor — one of the most abundant biogenic emissions in the troposphere —in an atmospheric chamber under continuous NO injection over 24 hours. This experimental condition provides different NOx levels with constant branching ratios (p) which mimic the ambient conditions described by global Geos-Chem results. She will utilize this award to boost her environmental knowledge though prepping for the FE and PE exams, purchasing additional books, and attending conferences and meetings.
Chas Frederickson
Mechanical Engineering
Chas’ current research studies the operational patterns of various non-road equipment and marine vessels. In the non-roadside of his research, he studies the activity of construction, agricultural, and cargo transfer port equipment. In the marine vessel side of his research, he focuses on harbor craft vessels and their operational patterns within their resident harbor. He hopes to expand his research to incorporate ocean going vessels. This category of marine vessels makes up a large portion of the marine vessel population. They also provide unique research challenges that will broaden his testing experiences.
Zhengwei Bai
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Zhengwei's current research is on object perception for autonomous driving with an emphasis on 3D object detection, tracking and reconstruction based on deep learning-based methods by utilizing high-resolution sensors, like camera or LIDAR. He is also currently the main contributor for a research project (named Cyber Mobility Mirror, i.e., CMM) funded by the Toyota InfoTech Lab. He is currently designing a cooperative object detection method by collecting LIDAR data from vehicle side and roadside to improve the object detection performance.
William R. Pierson/Ford Graduate Award Recipient
Tianbo Tang
Chemical & Environmental Engineering
Tianbo's current research includes emissions testing of ultra-low NOx Achates trucks using AVL PEMS systems and a mobile emissions laboratory. His goals are to better understand the real-world emissions and performance benefits of heavy-duty Class 8 diesel trucks equipped with an opposed piston engine and compare it with a baseline diesel Class 8 truck. One of his major future studies will involve hydrogen (fuel cell) which will focus on testing the primary emissions from vehicles using hydrogen as fuels. He looks forward to continuing this work and further developing his own expertise in the field by reading vehicle emissions-related literature and eventually publishing his own findings in journals.
G. Neal Richter Scholarship in Energy Innovation Award Recipient
Luis Fernando Enriquez-Contreras
Electrical Engineering
Luis's current research is focused on microgrid management. His goal is that every EV and microgrid should utilize the same software and protocols with free software that any company, individual community, and research group can utilize to ensure that future electric vehicles have the capability to work seamlessly in a microgrid eco-system. By creating a free and open-source Python library for integrating various components into an intelligent microgrid developed specifically for transportation loads, he hopes to integrate all the microgrid components and make a smart network that can be utilized for all types of microgrids. He believes his creation will eventually spawn a community willing to create microgrids to reducing costs for NGOs, governments, and benefit our environment.
Salim Khan Award Recipient
Afsara Tasnia
Chemical & Environmental Engineering
Afsara's research focuses on the measurement and analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from biogenic, anthropogenic, and pyrogenic sources. Currently, she is working on characterizing the anthropogenic VOC (AVOC) emissions in Los Angeles (LA) basin, where historically vehicular emission was the major source of anthropogenic emission. She has also actively take part in LAAQC'2022 campaign to be held during summer 2022 to compare between the AVOC emission profiles for during and post pandemic scenarios. Her future research involves characterizing biogenic VOC (BVOC) emission profiles from the Alaskan Arctic to collect ambient air samples to fill in knowledge gap regarding the interdependency of terrestrial BVOC and climate change.
Ford Motor Company Undergraduate Award Recipient
Andrea Delgado
Environmental Science
Andrea's research focuses on the utilization of low-cost instrumentation to track personal and ambient air quality trends within the westside community of San Bernardino, CA surrounding the BNSF San Bernardino Railway (SBR) As Lead Undergraduate Researcher, she worked alongside the project specialist and graduate student in research protocol, low-cost instrumentation deployment, technical troubleshooting of APT monitors, PM2.5 data analysis, participant scheduling, community meetings, and education curriculum. She currently guide undergraduate students who deploy research equipment, relay data collection protocols, and disseminate health surveys. She aspires to engage in efforts to decrease the impact of future human activities on our environment via sustainable efforts that minimize city carbon footprints, improve community resiliency, and move towards net-zero developments and carbon neutrality in California.
Miller/Durbin Fellowship Award Recipient
Hanwei Zhu
Chemical & Environmental Engineering
Hanwei has been in the AQMD 200 Vehicles Study since 2018, focused his studies on HDDVs (Heavy-Duty Diesel Vehicles) within the country, including testing using portable emissions measurement systems (PEMS), portable activity measurement systems (PAMS), chassis dynamometer emissions testing, and on-road testing with an emissions trailer. With CE-CERT’s support, he would like to go beyond the realm of the emissions testing and provide him a chance to present his research at major conferences and workshops across the country. He will be attending the 31st CRC Real World Emissions Workshop as a presenter sharing his research.
Atmospheric Processes Laboratory (APL) Award Recipient
Zihan Zhu
Chemical & Environmental Engineering
Back in 2020, Zihan led a team to a 3-months long field campaign at Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program's Southern Great Plains (SGP) site in Oklahoma studying and measuring measured particle growth and related characteristics. Her passion in studying Aerosol is propelling her to lead another project in the TRACER campaign at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility this summer.
Transportation Systems Research (TSR) Award Recipient
Zhouqiao Zhao
Electrical Engineering
Zhouqiao is currently pursuing the Ph.D. here at CE-CERT to deepen his knowledge and develop his research skills in intelligent transportation. His current research evokes personalized vehicle automation, vehicle cooperation in mixed traffic condition, cooperative perception, small-scale autonomous vehicle platform design, and large-scale eco-dispatching.