Kristen Schell

Biography

Professor Kristen Schell joined the CU Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering faculty on July 1, 2020. Prof. Schell’s research areas include: wind power modeling and forecasting, power systems planning for negative emissions, strategic behaviour in electricity markets, renewable energy policy design, and design for adoption of adaptable, modular microgrids.

Dr. Schell’s current focus is on amplifying the share of electric power generated through renewable energy sources like wind power and overcoming the problems that the integration of these sources poses to system resource adequacy, reliability and resilience. Her models are informed by large, empirical datasets from wind power producers, electric utilities, independent system operators, numerical weather prediction models and earth systems models. She works to develop novel machine learning and optimization methods that support decision-making for the energy transition, from the community to the federal level.

Previously, Dr. Schell was an Assistant Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY, where she was part of a team awarded a US Department of Energy (DOE) ARPA-E grant. Prior to RPI, Dr. Schell was an IVADO Post-doctoral Fellow at Polytechnique Montreal and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan. She holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS in Environmental Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and dual Engineering PhDs from Carnegie Mellon University and the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Porto, Portugal.

Research Positions Available:

• Ph.D position ‘Physics-informed Deep Learning for Wind Power’ in the APEX lab.