Friendly chatter and laughter filled the room as faculty, staff, and student members of the Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute gathered together for the Institute’s planning meeting. Though the mood was light, as the planning session got underway, the room became more serious. Energy research. Cloud computing. Data analytics. Topics that are relevant to all aspects of society — from digitally protecting a company’s confidential data, to deciphering massive amounts of data, to shaping the technological landscape to create a more sustainable future.
“The research that is currently taking place here at the Institute not only affects the issues we deal with today, but the issues that we as a society are going to be dealing with ten, twenty, and forty years down the line,” said Les Shephard, institute director and McDermott Distinguished Chair in Engineering.
In addition to the groundbreaking research taking place at the Institute, Shephard says that the Institute’s team of faculty, staff, and students work together in an innovate and collaborative environment.
“We are building a cyber physical system that we call the Roadrunner Open Cloud (the ROC) energy analytics platform in partnership with the Open Cloud Institute,” said Dwain Rogers, a public policy expert and attorney working as research director at the Institute. “The ROC allows faculty, staff, and students to work together to process data in near real-time, create insights and new intelligence for our industry partners, and couple that info with a laboratory physical infrastructure.”
And it’s not just the faculty and staff members that are doing the leg work in the Institute. Juan Gomez, associate director and research director of the Institute, stresses that the UTSA students who work at the Institute play an integral part in the Institute’s success.
“We work as an interconnected unit, playing off of each other and using each other for support,” Gomez said. “The UTSA students who work at the Institute come from a variety of interdisciplinary fields and make a huge impact on the work that is being done.”
Rolando Vega, a research director at the Institute, works in renewable energy and grid forecasting, said that the Institute’s laboratories host over 30 graduate and undergraduate students and 18 faculty members in science, engineering, and business.
Current research being done with the Institute includes Building Technologies led by Dr. Bing Dong; Power Electronics and Power Systems led by Dr. Hari Krishnaswami; Software Communications and Navigation led by Dr. David Akopian; Advanced GIS and Mapping Technologies led by Dr. Hongjie Xie; Applied Mathematics and Image Processing led by Dr. Walter Richardson; Wind Farm and Flow Modeling led by Dr. Kiran Bhaganagar; Information Systems and Cyber Security led by Dr. Nicole Beebe, Dr. Glenn Dietrich, and Dr. Max Kilger; Data Science by Dr. DJ Ko; Renewable Energy Management by Dr. Nikolaos Gatsis; Computational Statistics and Data Analysis led by Dr. David Han; Energy Engenderment led by Dr. Afamia Elnakat; and Open Cloud Computing led by Dr. Jeff Prevost and Paul Rad.
“We want to push the boundaries of imagination and create new amazing energy technologies in the process,” said Vega.
The Institute is one of the reasons that UTSA is on the forefront of sustainability research — creating new knowledge and finding toptier solutions to real energy problems in San Antonio, the nation, and beyond. The Institute was established in 2010 to serve as a catalyst for coalescing the many energy research and education projects underway at the university. Specializing in the areas of energy and sustainability, the institute maintains strong partnerships with CPS Energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Microsoft, private energy companies, universities, and nonprofits.
—By Deborah Silliman Wolfe/College of Engineering
Rolando Vega/The Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute
