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 provided various skills through learning from those he's had the pleasure of collaborating with. Notable projects include working with novel precision agriculture technologies, modeling phenomena including thermo-fluids at varying velocities or crop growth from seeding to harvest 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.”

Recently, he began a PhD in the Advanced Energy Systems program at the Colorado School of Mines. He is learning about ongoing research at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and hoping to begin making contributions as soon as possible.

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 group.

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)