Mikhail Chester, Assistant Professor
Background
Mikhail Chester is an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University in Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering and an Affiliate Faculty in the School of Sustainability. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in August 2008 in Civil & Environmental Engineering. His research focuses on transportation and urban infrastructure systems as foundational components that affect the sustainability of cities.
Chester is leading research efforts to develop an understanding of how urban systems have been deployed, frameworks for assessing their energy and environmental impacts, and strategies for transitioning infrastructure systems for twenty-first century needs. His goal is to develop the science for understanding how embedded infrastructure design enables the emergent behaviors that we often consider to be unsustainable, and for analyzing and breaking path dependencies that will aid in transitioning to lower energy and environmental impact futures. His graduate work through 2008 largely focused on transportation infrastructure and since then he has focused more broadly on the interface of infrastructure and urbanization processes. Approximately half of his work is focused on the assessment of transportation systems and the other half land use, water, and energy systems, including their interdependencies. He has begun studying the role that infrastructure plays in contributing to extreme heat events in the US Southwest. His long-term research goals are to advance our understanding of how urban infrastructure design should balance the life-cycle benefits and costs of integrated systems with sensitivity to social-equity, economic growth, and future climate-constraints.
Prior to receiving his doctorate from UC Berkeley, Chester earned two M.S. degrees in Civil & Environmental Engineering (one from UC Berkeley in 2005 in the Systems program and the other from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003 in the Civil Infrastructure Systems program). He received his B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002 with a double major in Civil & Environmental Engineering and Engineering & Public Policy.
