1/11/2023
CAREER awards are the NSF’s most prestigious form of support and recognition for junior faculty.
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CEE assistant professor Eleftheria Kontou has won a National Science Foundation CAREER award. Her project will advance the science of bidirectional electric vehicle (EV) and infrastructure technologies management, which enable EVs to serve as mobile energy storage resources, providing services to buildings and enhancing the resilience of urban energy systems during power outages.
CAREER awards, administered under the Faculty Early Career Development Program, are the NSF’s most prestigious form of support and recognition for junior faculty who “exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.”
Kontou’s research plan will advance systems science at the transportation-energy nexus by:
- Creating coupled electric vehicle and residential/office energy use profiles that capture alternative management objectives and EV drivers’ preferences
- Developing EV one-way and bidirectional infrastructure location decision-making models that center on distributive equity
- Modeling of EVs as distributed resources and assessing their services during power outages that are exacerbated by climate change
“This research envisions urban electrified transportation systems with management of bidirectional energy exchanges and infrastructure deployment for urban environmental sustainability, equity and resilience,” Kontou said.
Kontou joined CEE at Illinois in 2019. Her research interests include transportation planning, electrification and emerging vehicle technologies operations, and transportation and energy sectors interdependencies.