My name is Andy Zhang, a third-year PhD candidate. My background before becoming a geographer was in energy resources management, and specifically energy resources. One of my recent publications was about distributed renewable generation in rural West Virginia. My current research is mainly focused on energy transition and how it has affected local communities, as well as the infrastructure’s vulnerability in terms of outages or repeated energy utility disruptions. I am also working on the application of deep learning GeoAI models to detect and locate small-scale energy utility infrastructure.

I am currently a teaching associate for GEOG 111, Our Digital Earth, focused on introducing GIS, remote sensing, and cloud computing for geospatial analysis.