Dr. Siobhan Powell

Siobhan is a Senior Researcher in the Group for Sustainability and Technology (SusTec) at the Department of Management, Technology and Economics of ETH Zurich. She joined the group in September 2022 and is supported by an ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Siobhan researches the decarbonization of electricity and transportation, with a particular focus on improving the grid impacts of electric vehicle (EV) charging. In her Ph.D. she studied the roles of driver behavior, charging infrastructure networks, and smart charging in driving EV charging demand.

She specializes in modeling and she has expertise in using data-driven methods, optimization, and machine learning. Her research questions have covered many different scales of the problem: short-term operation or long-term planning; individual driver behaviors or state-wide demand modeling; distribution grid equipment or bulk-power system generator dispatch. She is also interested in the role and design of policies related to the energy transition.

Siobhan earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Download Mechanical Engineering from Download Stanford University, California in 2022 and 2018. At Stanford Siobhan was advised by Professor Download Ram Rajagopal of the Stanford Sustainable Systems Lab (S3L). She also worked closely with the Grid Integration, Systems, and Mobility (GISMo) Download group at Download SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Interdisciplinary Energy Systems (INES) research Download group led by Professor Download Inês Azevedo.

Siobhan developed the SPEECh model of large-scale electric vehicle charging demand. SPEECh stands for Scalable Probabilistic Estimates of Electric vehicle CHarging. This project was supported by GISMo, by close collaboration with the Download California Energy Commission (CEC), and by the Bits & Watts Initiative of the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Originally from Toronto, Canada, Siobhan earned her B.Sc.(Eng) from Download Queen’s University in 2016 in the Mathematics & Engineering Program.

In her free time, Siobhan loves to read, sing, and skate, and to cook for her family and friends.