Students

Baskar Ganapathysubramanian and Adarsh Krishnamurthy are his faculty advisor. For the Iowa Urban FEWS project, he is working on doing the Navier-Stokes and Heat-Transfer coupled simulations to get insights about trees’ impact on building energy use. Based on the Bayesian Optimization and the simulation data, he is finding the Nusselt number correlation for making the new convection coefficient model inside EnergyPlus.

Emily Drennen Hatch is an undergraduate architecture student from Iowa State University minoring in sustainability. Ulrike Passe is her faculty advisor. For the Iowa Urban FEWS project, she is working as the website developer and on the MDL team. As the web developer, the goal is to keep all Iowa Urban FEWS information regarding the research up to date, along with aiding in poster design and newsletter layouts. For the MDL team, she is working to help digitally model component systems measuring potential reductions in heat transfer to buildings with plants.

Poojan Sanjay Patel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering department at The University of Texas at Arlington. He holds an M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Mumbai, India. He focuses his research on sustainability improvement projects with an emphasis on supply chain, logistics, and quality improvement. He is a member of the human systems modeling team for the Iowa Urban FEWS project and is working under Dr. Caroline Krejci on the development of an agent-based model to simulate the dynamic interactions, adaptations, and decision-making processes of Iowa farmers in a virtual environment.

Poojan Sanjay Patel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering department at The University of Texas at Arlington. He holds an M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Mumbai, India. He focuses his research on sustainability improvement projects with an emphasis on supply chain, logistics, and quality improvement. He is a member of the human systems modeling team for the Iowa Urban FEWS project and is working under Dr. Caroline Krejci on the development of an agent-based model to simulate the dynamic interactions, adaptations, and decision-making processes of Iowa farmers in a virtual environment.

Rushi Patel is an undergraduate mechanical engineering student at Iowa State University. He is working under the supervision of Prof. Ulrike Passe. He works on the project to assess the impact of vegetation on building cooling loads, Therefore, he analyzes thermal data after collecting it from Mobile Diagnostics Lab (MDL) and the local weather station in Des Moines, Iowa. For the Iowa Urban FEWS project, he is working with other students to calibrate an energy model for the MDL with the collected data to include vegetative coverings into the energy assessment process. Further goals are to keep the MDL and weather station sites up to date.

Sedigheh Ghiasi graduated from the University of Tehran with a master’s degree in architecture and energy. She is currently pursuing a second master’s degree in the field of sustainability and energy efficiency in the built environment. She is a sustainable Cities Research Group member conducting research under professor Passe’s supervision. She is currently working on finding an algorithm for tree growth patterns. The final product of her research will be a solar map for the Capitol East neighborhood in Des Moines. Her second focus is on data-driven applications in urban energy efficiency management.

Vishal Muralidharan is pursuing a Ph.D. under Prof. Baskar Ganapathysubramanian. His research is pertinent to Objectives 3 and 4 of the Iowa UrbanFEWS Project. He works on Thermal and Built Forms, where he focuses on manipulating the Building Simulation Engine, EnergyPlus, on modeling the effects of Green Facades and the impact of Evapotranspiration from vegetation on incident heat flux into a building wall. He also works on Cosimulation, which seeks to seamlessly integrate the various Iowa UrbanFEWS models across the MSA and Urban Scales.

Wei Chen is a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Yuyu Zhou. She got her master’s degree in cartography and geography information systems from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. During her Ph.D. study, her main research activities have been concerned with the impact of urban climate on building energy use. For the Iowa UrbanFEWS project, she is currently working on the urban climate simulations using Weather Research & Forecasting Model (WRF).

Boshun Gao has a Master’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis. Currently, he was a PhD student under Dr. Baskar Ganapathysubramanian’s supervision from Iowa State University. His work involved developing a framework of immersed boundary method for finite element analysis to solve coupled Navier-Stokes and heat transfer for complex geometries.

Diba Malekpour Koupaei holds a master’s degree in Sustainable Environments from Iowa State University (2018) and received her bachelor’s degree from Art University of Isfahan in Architectural Engineering (2015). in recent years her main research activities have been concerned with energy efficiency in the built environment, specifically high-performance residential buildings in the urban landscape. In August 2018 she became an active member of the Sustainable Cities multidisciplinary research group, where she follows her passion for integrating the human dimension of energy consumption into the efficiency equation for mitigating and adapting to climate change. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at Iowa State University.

Erin Huckins is an M.S. student in the Sustainable Agriculture program at Iowa State University, and is housed in the Department of Natural Resource and Ecology Management. Her research background includes urban agriculture and the influence of urban gardening on community. With the Iowa UrbanFEWS project, she is a member of the human systems modeling team, where she will develop a social network analysis that will represent consumer decisions and interactions within local food systems throughout Des Moines.

Manon Geraudin, studied civil engineering and urban planning at INSA (Institute National des Sciences Appliquees) Lyon, in France, spent her internship October 2019 to March 2020 at ISU. Her research expertise in building and high environmental quality contributed to the team with urban energy simulations for a sensitivity study and she develop the summer 2020 planting experiment with the Mobile Diagnostics Lab (MDL).

Megan M. Ruxton is a Senior Research Scientist with the Center for Social and Behavioral Research (CSBR) at the University of Northern Iowa and is serving as part of the evaluation team for the Iowa UrbanFEWS project. At CSBR, she collaborates on several surveys, evaluations, and other applied social science research projects in the areas of education, STEM, public health, and natural resources.

Rushi Patel graduated with a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering in May 2023. He supported the team as an Undergraduate Research Assistant with the green wall data collection at the Mobile Diagnostics Lab (MDL). He also developed EnergyPlus Weather (EPW) files from collected weather data at the Mobile Weather Station in Des Moines. He was a co-author of the following paper: Passe, U., Fagubule, O., Patel, R., and Thompson, J. 2021. Utilizing a novel mobile diagnostics lab to validate the impact of vegetative wall coverings in building cooling load reduction. Proceedings of the 8th International Building Physics  Conference, August 25-27, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Sydney Collin participated in the UrbanFEWS team research as the first-ever remote research intern from INSA Lyon – Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon. She contributed significantly to the green wall Energyplus modeling effort and the probabilistic CFD data model. Her main contribution is this paper: Collin, S., and U. Passe, (2022). Building a workflow to model a green façade in a graphical user interface for EnergyPlus. Resilient City: Physical, Social and Economic Perspectives. Proceedings of the Architectural Research Centers Consortium and European Association for Architectural Education International Joint Conference.

Tanya Sharma was an undergraduate architecture student from Iowa State University. Ulrike Passe was her faculty advisor. Her area of research interest includes energy efficiency in the built environment. For the Iowa Urban FEWS project, she worked as a website developer.

Tiffanie Stone is a Ph.D. student in the Environmental Science program at Iowa State University and is housed in the Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management. Jan Thompson is her faculty advisor. Her research interests include sustainable urban food systems, food justice, agroecology, and the influence of policy on the environment. In the Iowa UrbanFEWS project, she will develop Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) models for the food system in Des Moines. These models integrate energy, water, and carbon dynamics associated with the food cycle. Her background includes an undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota in Applied Plant Science and a master’s degree in Agroecology from the Norwegian University of Life Science. Prior to this project, she worked as a Norwegian Peace Corps volunteer at an Agricultural Training Institute in Zanzibar and as a County Extension Director for Purdue University in agriculture, natural resources, and 4-H youth development.

Wei Chen is a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Yuyu Zhou. She got her master’s degree in cartography and geography information systems from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. During her Ph.D. study, her main research activities have been concerned with the impact of urban climate on building energy use. For the Iowa UrbanFEWS project, she is currently working on the urban climate simulations using Weather Research & Forecasting Model (WRF).

Yiming Wang has a master’s degree from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (2018) and received his bachelor’s degree from the China University of Geosciences in Beijing (2015). Currently, he is a Ph.D. student under Dr. Yuyu Zhou’s supervision. His research interests include water use and hydrological models. In the Iowa Urban FEWS project, he will use Soil & Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) for the watersheds within Des Moines.