DeCarolis receives NSF Career Award

Dr. Joseph F. DeCarolis, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award, known as the NSF CAREER Award, is one of the highest honors given by NSF to young faculty in science and engineering.

NSF will provide $400,795 in funding over a five-year period to support DeCarolis’s research project entitled, “Modeling for Insights with an Open Source Energy Economy Optimization Model.”

The project involves the development and application of energy economy optimization (EEO) models, which are computer models that enable optimization-based analysis of energy systems over multiple decades. Such models allow analysts to quantify how particular actions or events, such as oil price spikes or climate policy implementation, may affect economic and environmental outcomes of interest, such as gasoline prices or greenhouse gas emissions.

The project aims to advance the field of energy modeling by meeting four goals: instituting an open and transparent process for EEO model development and application; generating new insights into energy system development at the national and global scale through the rigorous application of uncertainty analysis; involving analysts, decision-makers, and students in the modeling effort by creating easy- to-use decision support tools; and using EEO models as a tool to teach students ranging from high school to graduate school to think critically about energy systems and environmental sustainability from a systems perspective.

DeCarolis will use Tools for Energy Model Optimization and Analysis (TEMOA) — an open-source framework that he and his students created — to provide researchers and educators with access to model source code and data as well as open source modeling tools.

Prior to joining the NC State faculty in 2008, DeCarolis was an environmental scientist at the US Environmental Protection Agency in the Office of Research and Development.

DeCarolis received a bachelor’s degree in 2000 from Clark University, where he double majored in physics and environmental science and policy. He earned his PhD in engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004.