Yi-An Chen is from Taiwan, also known as Formosa. Yi-An is a 5th year Ph.D. in Professor Jan Kleisl’s research group in the Center of Energy Research at UCSD. She got a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering and a master’s degree in Environmental Engineering at National Taiwan University. There her research focused on Capacitive Deionization for the water-energy nexus, and she interned at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturer Company. Her passion for the environment and renewable energy has inspired her to get her Ph.D. in renewable energy grid integration.

During her time at UCSD, she interned at NUVVE, a vehicle-to-grid technology pioneer, and built an optimal battery scheduling model for demand charge management and energy market participation, which was applied at UCSD in 2020 and profited $98 K in two months. Currently, she is cooperating with TotalEnergies and working on model predictive control for aggregated electric vehicle (EV) dispatch and EV flexibility. She is also a mountaineer and rock climber.

Yi-An’s research interests focus on energy storage optimization, demand charge management, energy market participation, EV flexibility, and marginal CO2 emission reduction.