Biography

I received my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2008 and my M.S. in Building Technology from MIT in 2011. My research is motivated by a desire to help society move towards more sustainable development while increasing quality of life throughout the world and I hope that investigating the complex interactions between social and natural systems will give some insight into that aim. My interest in sustainability began when I was living in Hawaii for a year, where I realized that cities consume far more than they produce in their local hinterlands.

My interests entail activities that allow me to explore the world and people around me: traveling, cooking, reading, writing and conversation. I prefer to travel outside and have cycled across the U.S. and Africa. Through my travels I became interested in water as a critical resource and the impact of sustainability on community health and culture.

Research

My research investigates the urban metabolism of water. Most recently I have been using System Dynamics approach to model Singapore's water supply management and its vulnerability to external perturbations and changing trends in supply and demand processes such as population, industry, and climate. The model aggregates demographic and physical island attributes to the spatial scale of Singapore and the temporal scale of years and decades. The model is intended to enable a meaningful assessment of how a proposed policy would affect future water availability within the urban system and to provide a platform for engaging policy makers and stakeholders, rather than quantitatively predict future supply and demand.

The next stages of this research are to explore the demographic trends pertaining to water consumption and to adapt the model to other cities. Both efforts will facilitate comparison of sustainable policies and strategies between Singapore and other regions and will inform one of the main research thrusts of the group, the development of a city typology.