Yiyang Chen

Yiyang grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago and recently finished his undergrad at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His diverse experiences during higher education gave him the opportunity to gain various skills by learning from those he's had the pleasure of collaborating with. Notable projects include working with novel precision agriculture technologies, modeling fluid dynamics, optimizing distributed farming from seed to harvest and transportation, contextual engineering abroad, developing horticultural practices in non-traditional locations, as well as designing and constructing a net-zero solar home. He is fascinated by the challenge of blurring the boundary between models and reality by simulating real-world phenomena. After all... "all models are wrong, some are useful.”

In August 2024, he began a PhD in the Advanced Energy Systems program at the Colorado School of Mines. After passing his Qualifying Research Exam, he is now a Graduate Intern at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (formerly NREL) in the Grid Planning and Analysis Center. He is working in projects to improve grid reliability, capacity expansion models, and production cost modeling through novel techniques.

He enjoys climbing and camping outdoors, unwinding at home, and irregularly volunteering with local organizations (typically soup kitchens and urban farms). This is his praxis for community-focused activism, which he believes in and pushed during his time at Illinois to his peers through the Students for Environmental Concerns. Yiyang is passionate about justice and equity; especially in accessibility to healthy food, clean water, reliable power, and impactful education. He is also a proud member of the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, being single-side deaf in his right ear.

CV: (Overleaf, evergreen)