By Ty Burke
In celebration of Carleton University’s 2023 Throwback week – a homecoming for alumni and community members – we sat down with seven alumni to see where they are now. Their stories moved us and reminded us of the impact our engineering and design alumni have on creating technology for good, sustainability, health and wellness, and social innovation.
Driving Innovation
Rimple Sandhu is a research scientist in computational science at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Boulder, Colorado.
In heavy traffic, there can be thousands of vehicles, and even more interactions between them. It’s not easy to optimize such a complex system, but there can be major environmental benefits to doing so. Traffic infrastructure and vehicle sensors now generate enough information to make roads more efficient and safer.
Rimple Sandhu (B’Eng ’12, PhD ’19), research scientist in computational science at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Boulder, Colorado.
“Every sensor lives in its own world.” says Sandhu. The lab is the U.S. Department of Energy’s flagship research lab for research in renewable energy.
“They have their own spatial-temporal resolutions, directories and real estate. Processing all this information is very challenging.”
Sandhu earned his Master of Applied Science from Carleton in 2012 and his PhD in 2019. Now, one of the projects he’s working on digital twin of traffic that processes sensor data with the goal of optimizing the routes of electric vehicle fleets.
“You have to process information from many sources in real time. And it has to be right, because it will eventually be used to determine signals,” says Sandhu.
The stakes can be high. If a truck sits at a red light too long, its fuel consumption will go up, but if a light turns green too soon, a pedestrian’s life could be at risk. Machine learning can help process information at the scale and speed necessary for this type of sophisticated model. And Sandhu is able to apply many of the techniques he learned during his time at Carleton, where his PhD research used algorithms to understand and predict dynamic instability in aircraft.
But he’s found a fit at the NREL, and plans to stay in Colorado for the long term.
“I thought I’d only be here a year or two and then go back to Ontario,” says Sandhu.
“But the NREL gives researchers a lot of independence, and opportunities to grow. And the research has immediate impact. So, I think I’ll be staying, and that’s great.”
Want to participate in Carleton’s 2023 Throwback events? Visit the alumni website to learn more.
Wednesday, September 20, 2023 in Alumni, Autonomous Vehicles, Autonomous Vehicles, Lead Feature Story
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