Rate My Professor Bolun Xu

Bolun Xu is an Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University, having joined the department in January 2020. He holds an affiliation with the Department of Electrical Engineering and serves as core faculty at the Columbia Electrochemical Energy Center and the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy. Prior to his appointment at Columbia, Xu was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Energy Initiative and Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems from July 2018 to December 2019. His academic background includes a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington in 2018, an MS in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 2014, and a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering through a dual degree program with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2011.

Xu's research focuses on sustainable energy systems, emphasizing the design, optimization, and control of energy storage, renewable integration, and decarbonization technologies within power grids and electricity markets. His contributions include modeling battery degradation, vehicle-to-grid operations, and power system economics for climate resilience. Notable publications feature "Modeling of lithium-ion battery degradation for cell life assessment" (2018), "Using battery storage for peak shaving and frequency regulation: Joint optimization for superlinear gains" (2018), "Technoeconomic model of second-life batteries for utility-scale solar considering calendar and cycle aging" (Applied Energy, 2020), "The role of electricity market design for energy storage in cost-efficient decarbonization" (Joule, 2023), "Predicting strategic energy storage behaviors" (IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 2023), and "Vehicle-to-grid fleet service provision considering nonlinear battery behaviors" (IEEE Transactions on Transportation Electrification, 2023). Xu has received the NSF CAREER Award (2022), INFORMS ENRE Early Career Best Paper Award (2023), IISE Energy Systems Division Outstanding Young Investigator Award (2023), Outstanding Reviewer awards from IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (2020) and Sustainable Energy (2018), and the Clean Energy Institute Scientific Achievement Award (2018).