Current Students

Cheng-Hau Yang, a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University

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, Undergraduate Student in Architecture, Iowa State University

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.

Emma Todey

Fatemeh Yazdandoust

Poojan Sanjay Patel, a Ph.D. candidate in Industrial Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington

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, Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University

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, a former M.S. student in Architecture, now Ph.D. Student in Geological and Atmospheric Science, Iowa State University

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, Ph.D. Student in Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University

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, Ph.D. Student in Geological and Atmospheric Science, Iowa State University

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).