Ask UT Austin Anything about Energy

Hugh Daigle: Daigle’s research focuses on petrophysical and reservoir engineering aspects of sustainable energy using a combination of laboratory experiments and numerical simulation. He holds a BA in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University and a PhD in Earth Science from Rice University. Specific areas of interest include methane hydrate formation and response to marine hydrate systems to external perturbations; petrophysical measurement and assessment techniques; geohazard detection and prediction; and hydrogen generation and storage. His work is aimed at improving the understanding of subsurface fluid flow for the sustainable energy transition. 

James Dyer: Jim Dyer is a professor of IROM at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business and an internationally recognized leader in decision analysis and risk theory. He earned his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees at UT Austin, previously taught at UCLA, and returned to McCombs in 1978, where he teaches decision analysis, multi-objective decision making, and management science. Dyer has made foundational contributions to risk analysis and investment science, authoring three books and over 100 scholarly articles on complex decision-making in areas such as nuclear security, energy strategy, biodiversity, and price forecasting. He has served as a consultant to organizations including RAND, Schlumberger, TotalEnergies, and the U.S. Department of Energy, and contributed to NASA’s Voyager mission trajectory decisions. He is an INFORMS Fellow and recipient of the Frank P. Ramsey Medal and the MCDM Edgeworth-Pareto Award, honoring his lifetime impact on decision science. 

Carey King: Dr. Carey W. King conducts interdisciplinary research on how energy systems interact with the economy, environment, and policy, focusing on how societies make tradeoffs among competing priorities. His work emphasizes rigorous analysis of past energy systems to better anticipate future pathways. King is a Research Scientist at The University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Director of the Energy Institute, with additional appointments in the Jackson School of Geosciences and the McCombs School of Business. He holds both a B.S. with high honors and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UT Austin. His research appears in leading journals such as Nature Geoscience, Environmental Science & Technology, and Energy Policy, and he regularly writes for major newspapers and science magazines. He also holds several patents from his time as Director of Scientific Research at Uni-Pixel Displays, Inc. 

Kara Kockelman: Kara Kockelman is a registered professional engineer and holds a Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. in civil engineering, a master’s in city planning and a minor in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. Kockelman has been a professor of transportation engineering at The University of Texas at Austin for 26 years, and is associate site director of the NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Efficient Vehicles and Sustainable Transportation Systems. She has authored over 230 journal articles (and two books), and her primary research interests include planning for shared and autonomous vehicle systems, the statistical modeling of urban systems, energy and climate issues, the economic impacts of transport policy and crash occurrence and consequences. 

Diana Marculescu: Diana Marculescu is Department Chair and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, holding the Cockrell Family Chair for Engineering Leadership and the Motorola Regents Chair. She joined UT Austin in 2019 after a distinguished career at Carnegie Mellon University, where she served as the David Edward Schramm Professor, Associate Department Head, and Founding Director of the Center for Faculty Success. Marculescu earned her engineering degree from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on energy- and reliability-aware computing, hardware-aware machine learning, and sustainable computing. A Fellow of both ACM and IEEE, she has received numerous honors, including the NSF CAREER Award, multiple best paper awards, and international leadership distinctions in computing and engineering. 

Alexandros Savvaidis: Manager of the Texas Seismological Network (TexNet), with over 30 years of experience in seismology and applied geophysics across academia and industry. Currently oversees Texas’s statewide network of 210 real-time seismic stations. Previously managed Greece’s largest seismographic network, comprising 100 real-time and 150 offline stations. Research expertise spans earthquake physics (natural and induced seismicity), engineering seismology, Earth observation, disaster risk reduction, and environmental and exploration geophysics. Work focuses on understanding induced seismicity related to oil and gas, geothermal, CCUS, and mining activities; real-time ground-motion monitoring; ShakeMap implementation; and data fusion for hazard mitigation. In applied geophysics, specializes in acquiring, processing, and modeling seismic and electromagnetic data to build 1D–3D Earth models for urban, basin, and exploration studies. An expert in surface-wave analysis and crustal modeling, leveraging high-performance computing at TACC to optimize inversion workflows. 

Hao Zhu: Dr. Hao Zhu is an Associate Professor and holds the Texas Atomic Energy Research Foundation Centennial Fellowship in Electrical Engineering in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Before that, she has been an Assistant Professor of ECE at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) from 2014-2017. Her research interests include energy data analytics and cyber-physical situational awareness for power grids. Dr. Zhu received the NSF CAREER Award in 2017, the Siebel Energy Institute Seed Grant in 2016.