I am a first-generation college student and pursued my PhD degree in EE as an international student at Arizona State University from 2012 to 2016. With such a background, I fully understand and appreciate the challenges facing today’s first-generation college students and international students: the uncertainty of career path, the financial burden, the expectation from your family while they don’t fully understand your new life and PhD journey, and the difficulty in navigating new enviroment and learing new culture while doing well in your courses and research, the challenge of being far from home. I am incredibly fortunate to have had some incredible mentors through my student life and later professional life, and that has inspired me to become a professor and instilled in me a strong commitment to mentoring. I support open, and equal mentorship. I want to create a safe, friendly and diverse environment for my students where they not only excel academically but also mentally.

I am passionate about sustainability and engineering for social good. I believe that personal interest and motivation(passion) are the best teachers and can lead us through various challenges and to our final desitination or life goals. Therefore, I respect students’ interest and motivations. I will try my best to align them with the resesrch proejcts or topics in our lab. (It should also be noted that there is no perfect alignment/match in the world.) This is also why I want to make sure that every new member is truely interested in these topics before they join our lab. I don’t like micro-management. However, when students need help (or I see they do), I will provide suggestions and guidance. This will definitely be dynamic during the course of students’ PhD journey. Usually I tend to provide more direct and detailed suggestions/comments in the first year to help them get on track quickly and smoothly.

I also strongly believe in interdisciplinary research. The research in the lab lies at the intersection of power systems, renewable, building and transportation systems, AI, data science, computing, control, etc. As such, diversity is highly appreciated. Stduents’ unique background and experience matters and will be appreciated in the lab. I want the students to be themselves as much as they can. Also, students are encouraged to read and expose to other research topic areas or domains. New ideas will usually emerge suddently after enough connections are made across domains. Last but not least, I am a big fan and strong supporter of open source. This will maximize the impacts of our work in the long-term and promote reproducibility of all research work. Most of our previous research works have been open-sourced (we will add their links in our lab website soon), and we will continue to do so.