RENEW Lab
The Renewable Energy and Equity Worldwide (RENEW) Laboratory is a unique research, development, project implementation, and community outreach laboratory based at the Johns Hopkins University in the Civil and Systems Engineering Department and the School of Advanced International Studies. RENEW focuses on designing, testing, and disseminating renewable and appropriate energy systems. The laboratory’s mission is to help these technologies realize their full potential to contribute to environmentally sustainable development in both industrialized and developing nations while also addressing the cultural context and range of potential social impacts of any new technology or resource management system.
Daniel Kammen, Principal Investigator
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Energy and Climate Justice
Daniel Kammen (he/him) is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Energy and Climate Justice in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering (CASE), and the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He plays a leadership role in the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI).
Kammen’s work is focused on energy innovation, decarbonization, energy access, and climate justice. He most recently served as Senior Advisor for Energy and Innovation at the US Agency for International Development (USAID: 2021 – 2022).
Kammen was appointed the first Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) Fellow by Secretary of State Hilary R. Clinton in April 2010 and served as Science Envoy for Secretary of State John Kerry and President Barack Obama (2016- 2017).
His research is focused on the science and policy of decarbonized energy systems, energy access, and environmental justice. He has published more than 500 papers, which are available on his laboratory website, the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL, http://rael.berkeley.edu). His research is currently focused on: decarbonization of power systems around the world; energy access and social justice; materials science for low-carbon economies; big-data approaches to clean transportation, and on the electrification of health facilities across Africa.
Kammen serves on the board of the Tetiaroa Society, dedicated to marine conservation and cultural survival in French Polynesia. He is also part of the blueClimate Initiative, dedicated to accelerating ocean-based strategies to combat climate change. He is working towards opening a unique Johns Hopkins University campus on the Kenyan coast where a core research and teaching faculty will be based around a sustainable Blue Economy. Kammen works closely with NTNU (Trondheim, Norway) at the University Centre in Svalbard on arctic sustainability and concerns over polar deep-seabed mining.
Kammen has founded or is on the board of over 10 companies, and has served the State of California and US federal government in expert and advisory capacities. Kammen was the First Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency at the World Bank (2010–2011).
Kammen was educated in physics at Cornell and Harvard and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and Harvard. Before moving to the University of California, Berkeley, he was Assistant Professor and Chair of the Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Program at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Dr. Kammen has served as a contributing or coordinating lead author on various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1999. The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Kammen serves on the Advisory Committee for Energy & Environment for the X-Prize Foundation. He is on the board of Native Renewables (Flagstaff, AZ); the Chabot Space and Science Center (Oakland, CA), The Human Needs Project/Kibera Town Center (Nairobi, Kenya).
Kammen was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.
Kammen was elected to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences in 2025.
He is a member of the Diversity Scholars Network, https://lsa.umich.edu/ncid/engagement-opportunities/diversity-scholars-network.html
Dan Kammen & Claire Broido host the Energy Matters podcast, available on streaming services and directly at https://energymatters.world
Email: kammen@jhu.edu
BlueSky (@dankammen.bsky.social)
Samuel Miles, Postdoctoral Researcher
Sam’s (he/him) research sits at the intersection of electricity and international development. His PhD project (UC Berkeley 2020-2025) adopted an implementation research approach, piloting novel methodologies for quantifying power quality and reliability in hospitals in Fragile, Conflict, and Violence affected African geographies using telemetry and the internet-of-things, innovative survey tools, and geospatial analysis. He currently directs a number of workstreams at the intersection of power and health, including partnerships with Congolese health and electricity government ministries as well as a pilot installation of rugged power systems protection ICUs and other wards on ‘critical circuits’ at 20 hospitals and health facilities in the DRC.
Select Publications:
2025 — Miles, S., Mughuma, J., Moner-Girona, M., Kammen, D., Kwong, L. “The Power of Health in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Electricity Quality and Reliability in Medical Facilities of North Kivu Province.” Applied Energy
2025 — Kersey, J., Miles, S., Sakhrani, V., Koo, B., and Pelz, S. “A Geospatial Perspective on Electrification Strategy in Urbanizing Africa.” Applied Geography
2022 — Miles, S., Kersey, J., Cecchini, E & Kammen D. “Productive uses of electricity at the energy-health nexus: Financial technical and social insights from a containerized power system in Rwanda.” Journal of Development Engineering
2022 — Gill-Wiehl, A., Miles, S., Wu, J., & Kammen, D. “Beyond customer acquisition: A comprehensive review of community participation in mini grid projects.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews
Email: Smiles20@jh.edu
Areas of Interest: Health Facility Electrification; Solarization; Mini-grids; Internet-of-Things (IOT); Geospatial analysis; Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); African Great Lakes (AGL) region
Jason Hagler, Postdoctoral Researcher
Jason Hagler is a Post-Doc working on just economic growth by leveraging community and peer-to-peer structures. He is also the founder and director of Polaris Arctic Greenhouses, a non-profit dedicated to supporting community greenhouses in the Arctic. His PhD work at University of Pennsylvania focused on social cohesion and cooperation in Early China and Mesopotamia, examining patterns in ancient societies to look at issues such as sustainability in terms of social and institutional structure. His current research focuses on community driven solutions as a means of increasing adaptivity and resilience, using community governed organizations as a means for generating pathways to increased self sufficiency and sustainable development.
Alexandra Grayson, PhD Student
Alexandra (she/her) is a PhD student in Civil and Systems Engineering. She received her M.S. (2025) in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley and her B.S. (2022) in Interdisciplinary Environmental Science from Howard University. Her research focuses on coastal urban environments and lies at the intersection of climate policy modeling and critical environmental, economic, and energy justice methods and logics. A Baltimore native, in her free time Alexandra enjoys advocating for a just and sustainable future. She serves as a Chesapeake Bay Foundation Stanley Trustee and is a member of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Fire Weather, Technology and Risk.
Select Publications:
2025 — Montañés, C. C., Grayson, A., Kammen, D., & Callaway, D. “Dimensions and distribution of household energy insecurity in the United States.” Research Square preprint
2024 — El Kontar, R., Robertson, J., Cu, K. N., Grayson, A., Ling, J., Sotiropoulos, H., & Rakha, T. “An Open-Source Framework for Characterizing Urban Energy Models: Integrating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Methods to Predict Residential Buildings Characteristics” National Renewable Energy Laboratory
2023 — Ball, J., Forrester, S., Grayson, A., & Satchwell, A. “Electric vehicle program designs and strategies to enhance equitable deployment.” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
2023 — O’Shaughnessy, E., Grayson, A., & Barbose, G. “The role of peer influence in rooftop solar adoption inequity in the United States.” Energy Economics
Email: Agrayso6@jh.edu
Areas of Interest: Analytic tools; Climate policy; Energy; Environmental, Energy and Economic justice (EEEJ)
Heidi Li, PhD Student
Heidi (she/her) is a PhD student in Civil and Systems Engineering. She received her B.S. (2022) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was previously a Consulting Associate in the Energy Practice at Charles River Associates.
Email: Hli279@jh.edu
Xi Xi, PhD Student
Xi Xi (she/her) is a PhD who is passionate about energy technology adoption in emerging economies and industrial policies for equitable development. Xi Xi’s research has been focused on renewable integration, green hydrogen, and e-mobility in developing economies, particularly on the African continent, using methods and frameworks including capacity expansion models, industrial policy, technology policy, and other energy planning policy frameworks. She prioritizes Africa-centric research frameworks but brings perspectives from Africa-China and China-U.S. collaborations.
Prior to JHU, she worked with national and subnational governments as well as civil society in the U.S., China, and several African countries. She is primarily working in Kenya and Malawi but is generally open to work across the continent. She received her M.S. from the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, and B.A. in Math and Environmental Studies from Wellesley College.
Select Publications:
2026 — Xi, X., Kinyanjui, B., & Kammen, D. M. (2026). Reducing Power System Costs in LMICs through Grid-Connected Green Hydrogen: Evidence from Kenya. Environmental Science & Technology
2024 — Ball-Burack, A., Xi, X.*, Kammen, D., “From powerpoint to powerplant: evaluating the impact of the US-China Sunnylands commitment to tripling global renewable energy capacity by 2030” Environmental Research Letters (*Co-first authors)
Email: xxi4@jh.edu
Areas of Interest: Industrial policy; green hydrogen; renewable energy; electric vehicles; capacity expansion; technology policy; Africa; Kenya; Malawi; just transition; energy justice