Published research in Energy & Environmental Science

The energy thread started before the lab. I chose Princeton partly because I wanted to understand the energy transition as both an engineering problem and a business problem. The internships I picked were deliberate tests of that idea.

At TerraCycle I worked directly with the CAO on Japan expansion. I researched more than 100 Japanese companies, made dozens of cold calls and company visits, and translated both the pitch deck and the contract into Japanese. It was my first exposure to clean energy as a commercial operation rather than a policy cause.

At Bloom Energy in Tokyo I moved between corporate strategy, sales and business development, and engineering in the company's new Japan office, built with SoftBank. I researched U.S. and Japanese energy policy and market demand. I presented my work to internal teams five times. I helped support a partnership with Uniqlo and dug into component specs for German boilers going into the Japanese market. SunPower in San Jose rounded that out with a more hands-on engineering role.

Together, those jobs taught me one thing. The interesting problems in energy are not pure engineering problems. They sit at the boundary between engineering, economics, and execution. That conviction is what pulled me into Dan Steingart's lab. My senior thesis on zinc-bromine batteries became a peer-reviewed paper in Energy & Environmental Science. I also spent time in Bruce Koel's lab, which broadened the research beyond a single system.

A lot of the path that followed came from decisions that looked small at the time. Choosing Steingart's lab because he was the professor who answered my email. Taking the Tokyo role because it let me work at the intersection of engineering and market strategy. Deciding that the energy transition would only make sense to me if I understood both the technical systems and the financing around them.