bio

Yi Ju is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and is affiliated with the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. His research focuses on sustainable energy and infrastructure systems, with recent interests in demand flexibility from distributed energy resources, particularly buildings and electric vehicles. He views these infrastructures as large-scale, tightly coupled systems of heterogeneous resources and decision-makers, and develops scalable optimization algorithms, market mechanisms, and learning-based approaches for their planning and operation.

Yi received his PhD in Systems Engineering (2026), MS in Computer Science (2026), and MS in Architecture (2023), all from UC Berkeley. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2020, along with A second bachelor’s degree in Economics from Peking University.

His work has received the Building Simulation 2023 Best Student Paper Award and the ASME Energy Systems Technical Committee Best Paper Award in 2024 and 2026, among other honors. He was also named an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor at UC Berkeley in 2026. Yi founded eMERGE, a weekly seminar series that provides a platform for early-career researchers in energy, mobility, infrastructure, and sustainability to share their work and build connections across fields.