Aneesha Manocha
Currently: PhD Student, UC Berkeley; Formerly, Undergraduate Research Assistant
Aneesha is a PhD student in Energy Resources at University of California Berkeley.
From 2023-2024, Aneesha was a Kanders Churchill Scholar earning a Master’s in Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Previously, she was a research assistant in the Zero-carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab for three years as an undergraduate at Princeton University (2020-2023), where she completed her Bachelor of Science and Engineering in Electrical and Computer Engineering and received certificates in Statistics and Machine Learning, Optimization and Quantitative Decision Science, Environmental Studies, and Sustainable Energy. Following this year, she will be conducting her PhD in the Energy & Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. During her time in the ZERO lab, she worked on three projects: 1) utilizing GenX to analyze coal retirement decisions in India, 2) assessing the role of co-located renewable energy and energy storage installations to understand how the strategic siting of batteries could offset transmission reinforcements needed, and 3) identifying early market opportunities for long-duration energy storage in the American West. Beyond her research experience, she has interned with the Department of Energy, Centre for Social & Economic Progress, Prospect14, and RMI. She has been awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, High Meadows Environmental Institute Environmental Scholarship, and the Udall Scholarship Honorable Mention.