Avik
Ghosh
Doctoral Candidate
Avik is a Ph.D. student in the Grid Integration group of Prof. Jan Kleissl. He hails from the ‘City of Joy’, Kolkata (though he is more fond of the former name, Calcutta), India, and has completed his schooling (’15) and bachelor’s education (’19) from there, before joining UCSD in Fall ’19. The rising carbon footprint of the modern world deeply concerns him. He hopes that through his research, someday, he will be able to effect some (small) change in the quest towards the transformation to a majorly renewable energy-powered future.
Avik likes to play the guitar and listen to music in his spare time. He has a deep interest in Bengali (and more generally, non-fiction) literature, world (especially Indian) history, geopolitics, and political philosophies. He likes being a realist in his political thoughts/conduct, whilst being a romantic in his artistic pursuits. Like most other Calcuttans, he likes to engage in the quintessential freestyle chit-chat, Calcutta adda.
Avik’s current research focuses on applying control, probability theory, and convex optimization for smart charging/discharging of EVs and batteries. For his Ph.D., he thus far has mainly focused on reducing demand charges (and thereby overall electricity costs) incurred by consumers to utilities by smart usage of microgrid infrastructure. During the Summer of 2023, he interned at PNNL, where he developed rule-based low-compute smart thermostat control algorithms for reducing HVAC energy consumption and costs while maintaining thermal comfort.
Whilst being an undergrad at the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, he did research on design and thermal modeling of solar powered liquid desiccant cooling systems for hot and humid tropical/subtropical areas of the world. He also interned at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur where he designed a standalone solar cooling system for maintaining sufficient human thermal comfort conditions, throughout the year in office buildings of Kolkata.
You can find out more about his research and publications here – Google Scholar & ResearchGate.