I am a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the Department of Political Science and School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. My research focuses on energy justice, policy, and transition innovation. I joined the University of Toronto after receiving my PhD in Environment and Energy Policy from the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University. For my PhD dissertation, I used social-economic and legal lenses to examine the development of Pumped Underground Storage Hydro (PUSH) in abandoned underground mines in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. My dissertation was part of the more extensive study funded by the Alfred P. SLOAN Foundation. I further studied the techno-spatial potential for developing energy storage in various brownfield sites (abandoned mines) in the U.S.
My long-term vision is to build a social science researcher-led interdisciplinary energy transition lab for cold climates with a geographical focus on the Arctic and the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region. The goal is to understand and work with communities living at the tail end of the energy infrastructure directly affected by climate change. I am extremely interested in bringing communities, researchers, and educationalists from the American/European Arctic together with the communities and researchers from the Hindukush Himalaya (HKH) region. Based on my lived experience in HKH, people in these communities face relatively similar challenges and share similar lived experiences. It would be a valuable learning experience/workforce development opportunity to bring together people and resources from these regions to address the common existing threat of climate change. I want to work with the communities in the North that are often most vulnerable due to their geographical location and are often not actively engaged in technology and governance discussions that are made for them, and my goal is to initiate this conversation bottom-up, one community at a time.