This spring, ten UChicago master’s students completed a year of intensive research as part of one of EPIC’s graduate student research fellowship programs.
The James Bartlett Fellowship Program in Energy and Environmental Policy and DRW Graduate Fellowship in Economics and Policy allow students to assist faculty mentors in energy, environment or climate research projects. Over the course of the academic year, participants learned about the research process, made key connections, and gained critical skills in data analysis, writing, and coding.
Continue reading to hear from our 2025-2026 Bartlett and DRW Fellows on their research and reflections on their experience this year.
Ethan Caspi
DRW Fellow; Mentor: Mark Templeton
Ethan Caspi is a Master of Science in Computational Analysis and Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy. This year, Caspi worked with Mark Templeton, Clinical Professor of Environmental Law at the Law School and the Director of the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic. His work focused on creating an Agentic Retrieval Augmented Generation program for generating legal briefs, specifically in the context of energy rate cases in Michigan.
“Through this project, I saw how technical tools can be designed to support policy-relevant legal work, especially in complex areas like energy regulation. Building an AI system for legal brief generation showed me that engineering decisions are not purely technical; they shape how information is accessed, interpreted, and used by advocates and decision-makers. This experience helped me see a clearer path for combining my technical background with my interest in public policy, and it reinforced my desire to work on applied AI tools that serve public-facing or institutional needs.”
Chris Dunlap
Bartlett Fellow; Mentor: Robert Rosner
Chris Dunlap is a joint MBA/MPP student at the Booth School of Business and Harris School of Public Policy. As a Bartlett Fellow, Dunlap worked with Physics Professor Robert Rosner investigating whether AI data centers, which the grid currently treats as inflexible loads, can actually be credited as a flexible resource. He developed a framework that quantifies how much of a data center’s load can credibly be committed as grid flexibility.
“The U.S. energy buildout over the next decade is going to be shaped as much by regulatory and institutional decisions as by what’s technically possible, and I think I’ve learned that the people who can move credibly between those two languages are going to be useful in a way that pure technical or pure policy people won’t be. The fellowship was the first time I got to operate in that intersection on a real question, and it made me more certain that’s where I want to build my career.”
Lukman Edwidra Syafwardi
DRW Fellow; Mentor: Shaoda Wang
Lukman Edwidra Syafwardi is a Master of Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy. As a DRW Fellow, he worked with Harris Professor Shaoda Wang studying the impact of War on Pollution policy in China. His role included data preparation, data analysis, and report writing.
“This internship allowed me to navigate research projects and identify causal inference problems better using real world and often messy data. I’ve learned about managing a rigorous research project in environment and applying econometric tools to identify causal estimates of a program.”
Asad Javed
Bartlett Fellow; Mentor: Michael Greenstone
Asad Javed is a Master of Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy. During the 2025–2026 academic year, Javed worked as a Bartlett Fellow under the supervision of EPIC Director and Economics Professor Michael Greenstone. He supported research projects examining rural electrification, renewable energy adoption, carbon emissions, and the effectiveness of climate and energy policies.
“This fellowship strengthened my preparation for a future career in public policy by showing me how rigorous economic research can directly inform real world climate and energy decisions. Working at EPIC under Professor Michael Greenstone helped me better understand how evidence, data, and careful policy evaluation can guide decisions on energy access, decarbonization, affordability, and environmental protection. It also strengthened my ability to connect technical analysis with practical policy questions, which is essential for public policy work.”
Emma Mares
Bartlett Fellow; Mentor: Hajin Kim
Emma Mares is a Master of Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy. As a Bartlett Fellow, Mares worked with Law School Professor Hajin Kim. During the fellowship, she engaged in two major research projects with Kim’s team: one using geospatial data to help trace the impacts of the Sackett v EPA Supreme Court ruling, and another using LLMs to process large qualitative data and deliver tangible insights to corporate sustainability compliance.
“This fellowship enabled me to further develop my data processing capabilities, gain exposure to advanced programming methodologies, and deepen my proficiency in geospatial analysis. I had the pleasure to hone my ability to work with complex datasets, apply technical tools to current policy issues, and translate data into meaningful insights — all skills I aim to continue using throughout my career.”
Riley Morrison
DRW Fellow; Mentor: Eyal Frank
Riley Morrison is a Master of Science in Computational Analysis and Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy. Over the past academic year, Morrison worked as a data engineer for Harris Professor Eyal Frank and his research team. He worked with DHS survey data, locust swarm data, European Space Agency remote sensing land use data, and European birding data. Much of his work has been focused on building out ETL pipelines to transform raw data from these sources into datasets fit for econometric analysis.
“The fellowship reinforced that I want to be building data infrastructure, not just analyzing data that someone else prepared. So much of the work was about making messy, raw data usable for downstream analysis, and I found that process really satisfying. It also taught me how to work with researchers who think about problems differently than I do and how to translate between different kinds of technical groups. Those are skills I’ll carry into my future career for sure, whether that’s political data work, civic tech, or something else in the policy space.”
Firouz Niazi
Bartlett Fellow. Mentor: Kiran Chowla
Firouz Niazi is a Master of Public Policy candidate at the Harris School of Public Policy. As a Bartlett Fellow, Niazi worked with Kiran Chawla, a Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the Law School. Niazi gathered qualitative information about FEMA’s reform process, Congress’ proposals on restructuring the organization, and executive orders that altered the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA’s priorities.
“This fellowship has been precisely the experience I had sought when applying to graduate school. I knew I wanted to find time during my two-year MPP to conduct research and expand my understanding of the legal and economic underpinnings of modern energy politics, climate adaptation, and decarbonization initiatives worldwide. Moving forward, I have a sharpened set of research tools to examine complicated legal and policy questions in both the U.S. and abroad.”
Ayan Sarkar
Bartlett Fellow; Mentor: Elizabeth Moyer
Ayan Sarkar is a Master of Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy. As a Bartlett Fellow, Sarkar worked with Professor Elizabeth Moyer on improving the quality and usability of large-scale U.S. power plant datasets. His work involved validating and enriching plant-level records, reconciling inconsistencies across energy databases, and developing methods to recover missing facility information using a combination of AI-assisted workflows and external data sources.
“Through my work on power plant analysis and energy datasets, I saw firsthand how data quality and system assumptions can greatly influence what evidence is used in planning, regulation, and industry investment decisions. The experience showed me that policy impact first starts with clearly delineating how problems are measured, evidence is built, and decisions are evaluated.”
Alfred Yuan
Bartlett Fellow; Mentor: Hyuk-Soo Kwon
Dengjie (Alfred) Yuan is a Master of Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy. He worked as a research assistant for Harris Professor Hyuk-Soo Kwon, where he conducted research related to electric vehicles and the energy transition in China. His primary responsibilities included cleaning, organizing, and matching large-scale micro-level automobile sales datasets from multiple sources.
“Through this research experience, I gained exposure to the complete workflow of an academic research project, from data collection and cleaning to empirical analysis and model estimation. I further developed my technical skills in handling large-scale datasets and conducting quantitative economic research. These experiences have better prepared me for future academic research and a career in economics.”
After graduation, Yuan will continue working at EPIC as a pre-doctoral fellow.
Zhiyuan Zhou
DRW Fellow; Mentor: Olga Rostapshova
Zhiyuan Zhou is a Master of Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy. As a DRW Fellow, he supported large-scale environmental policy research under Energy & Environment Lab Executive Director Olga Rostapshova. His work focused on completing the health impact pipeline that evaluates whether ML-based inspection targeting can improve health outcomes over the EPA’s current strategy for Clean Air Act facilities. His role involved designing and implementing the complete pipeline, from model calibration to strategy analysis.
“This fellowship immersed me in a group of exceptionally dedicated and brilliant minds in environmental policy. Collaborating with them taught me how to translate massive, open-ended problems into granular, modular components, where each is independently testable, yet strategically aligned with our overarching objectives. Mastering this balance of modular thinking and collaborative rigor is a framework that will fundamentally shape my future career in public policy.”