Dr. Anton van Beek is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering where he is the principal investigator of the Optimization and Data for Designed Systems laboratory (ODDS-Lab). In this capacity, Anton aims to answer the following question: how can domain knowledge be integrated with data-driven methods to support the design of increasingly complex systems? His approach to addressing specific instances of this question is to describe a design problem mathematically, make predictions for untested conditions/decisions, and discover new knowledge by empirically verifying the generalizability of the developed method.

“I believe that “just transition” should involve the explicit balancing of disparate stakeholder interests to guide societal/cultural progress.” However, this is fundamentally impossible as no quantitative comparison between stakeholders’ preferences can be made. Nevertheless, group decisions hold the potential to bring about mutually and profoundly beneficial futures, and thus it becomes imperative to discover systematic methods that will enable the formulation of decisions that are effective and enjoy broad support from its stakeholders. Through collaboration with members of the UCD just transition group I hope to get a better understanding of the various challenges associated with “just transition” and contribute to addressing some of these challenges through the development of data-driven methods.”