Yunus Kinkhabwala, PhD, develops sophisticated data-driven models to guide decision making and policy. Projects include optimizing the geospatial siting of solar and storage resilience hubs for vulnerable populations; incorporating societal costs and benefits into the economic modeling of hourly electric generation models; and estimating detailed household energy usages and costs to investigate impacts of policy scenarios aimed at improving energy affordability for low-income households.
Dr. Kinkhabwala received his PhD in Applied Physics from Cornell University as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow where he developed methods inspired by statistical physics to forecast small area demographic changes. Prior to his PhD, Dr. Kinkhabwala taught secondary math and science at schools in Austin, TX and Dakar, Senegal; served as a U.S. Peace Corps Education and HIV/AIDS outreach volunteer in South Africa; and earned his BS in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.