2026.08 Raziye Aghapour (August 10) and Oluwatosin Atitebi (August 4) passed their PhD dissertation proposals.
2026.07 Dr. Jones gave an invited talk at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: “A Multi-Region Network Optimization Framework for Critical Mineral Supply Chain Resilience.”
2026.06 New paper in ACM Sustainability Week 2026: NZHR, an EnergyPlus-based serious game with an AI teammate for home retrofit decisions (Lee et al., with Dr. Jones).
2026.06 Dr. Jones presented year-two results of UTA’s Engineering for One Planet program at the ASEE Annual Conference in Charlotte. A second ASEE paper, with Billy Gray, covered the engineering economics of RFID-monitored data center cooling.
Spring 2026
2026.05 The IISE Annual Conference came to Arlington, with Dr. Jones on the host committee. Lab members co-authored ten papers in the proceedings: • Raziye Aghapour and Sarasadat Alavi: what drives ERCOT power-system models, quantum optimization, and lithium trade policy • Oluwatosin Atitebi: recovering metals from battery black mass, and upcycling battery graphite for 3D printing • John Conlin and Guillermo Conlin: a mobile microgrid controls testbed • Abinash Bastola: network intrusion detection • Raziye Aghapour, with the RET team: experiments for sustainable building design • a project portfolio selection paper • Dr. Jones: 3R-BET, a framework for remanufacturing, repurposing and recycling batteries (oral presentation)
2026.05 New paper in Electricity: “Megawatts to Zettaflops,” a techno-economic framework for powering AI data centers.
2026.01 New paper in Commodities mapping lithium-ion battery metals from mine to processing, by country and company (Akhter, Palli, Walanjuwani and Jones).
Also in 2026
2026 Congratulations to the lab’s 2026 graduates: Hritik Patil and Sisira Reddy Palli (MS), and Abinash Bastola and Guillermo Conlin (undergraduate).
2026 Dr. Jones became Director of the IISE Energy Systems Division.
2025
Dr. Jones presenting, summer 2025
Fall 2025
2025.12 New paper in Energies on how much U.S. driving extended-range EVs could electrify (Hritik Patil, Kumbhar and Jones).
2025.10 Dr. Jones presented lithium supply chain research at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta and gave an invited talk at East Texas A&M University.
2025.09 Dr. Jones led a UTA “AI Coffee Hour” for engineering faculty on building teaching tools.
Summer 2025
2025.07 New paper in Logistics comparing centralized and decentralized black-mass production for lithium battery recycling (Oluwatosin Atitebi and Jones).
2025.06 Dr. Jones presented year-one results of UTA’s Engineering for One Planet program at the ASEE Annual Conference in Montréal.
2025.06 Three lab papers at the IISE Annual Conference in Atlanta (May 31 to June 3): • Texas power system evolution (Raziye Aghapour, Sarasadat Alavi, Oluwatosin Atitebi) • solar degradation in the lab’s microgrid data (Siddharth Murkute and Abinash Bastola) • a Lego assembly line for teaching industrial engineering (Maheshwar Raju Mohanraj, Niranjan Ramalingam, Karthik Raj Ravichandran and Nithish Parameswaran)
Spring 2025
2025.04 New paper in Current Sustainable/Renewable Energy Reports on climate and trade policy for supply chain and energy modeling. Dr. Jones also gave an invited talk at North Carolina State University.
2025.03 New paper in Sustainability on geothermal power from legacy oil and gas infrastructure in tribal lands and HUBZones (Jones, Chandramouli Sridharan, Raziye Aghapour, Rodriguez).
2025.01 New paper in Energies on improving the preprocessing stage of lithium-ion battery recycling (Oluwatosin Atitebi, Kalpana Dumre and Jones). Dr. Jones also gave an invited talk at Colorado School of Mines.
Also in 2025
2025 Dr. Jones received an Honorable Mention for the INFORMS MIF Early Career Award.
2025 John Conlin joined the lab as a PhD student.
2025 Congratulations to the lab’s 2025 graduates: Toryon Evans, Syed Ajmal Shakeeb, Intesar Husain, Chandramouli Munjurpet Sridharan, Ahmed Saboor Syed, Saquib Raza Mohammed (MS), and Nathan Miranda and Siddharth Murkute (undergraduate).
2025 A paper with teachers from the lab’s NSF RET project, “Bringing college-level engineering research experiences into the K-12 classroom,” appeared at ASEE Gulf Southwest in Arlington (Zagozda et al., with Raziye Aghapour).
2025 UTA won a new NSF RET Site (2025–2030) on AI and machine learning for sustainable, resilient urban infrastructure, with Dr. Jones as Co-PI.
2024
Dr. Jones giving an invited talk at Prairie View A&M University, April 2024
Dr. Jones at the IISE Annual Conference, Montréal, May 2024
Fall 2024
2024.12 Congratulations to the lab’s December graduates: undergraduate researcher Cecilia Romero, and Maheshwar Raju Mohanraj, Niranjan Ramalingam, Karthik Raj Ravichandran and Nithish Parameswaran (MS), who stayed on in the lab on OPT.
2024.11 Dr. Jones moderated a panel on ERCOT emissions and resource adequacy at the Texas Energy Summit, and spoke at SymBER (Golden, CO) and Colorado School of Mines.
2024.11 New paper in Frontiers in Reproductive Health on dating app use among college students (Reeves et al., with Dr. Jones).
2024.10 Dr. Jones chaired the Energy cluster at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle.
2024.09 Invited talk at the University of Arkansas: “Energy Transition Supply Chains.”
Summer 2024
2024 summer Dr. Jones was a DOE FACES Fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, working on grid-interactive efficient buildings.
2024.06 Dr. Jones was a fellow at the Energy and Climate Tech-Innovation Policy Bootcamp in Washington, D.C.
2024.06 New paper at the IEOM North America conference on green building design optimization (Raziye Aghapour, Jones and Sarasadat Alavi). A paper with teachers from the RET project appeared at the ASEE Annual Conference in Portland (Thomason et al.).
Spring 2024
2024.05 New paper in Energies: a global optimization model of the lithium supply chain. At the IISE Annual Conference in Montréal, the lab presented a multi-source biofuel supply chain (Sarasadat Alavi, Toryon Evans, Oluwatosin Atitebi and others).
2024.04 Invited talk at Prairie View A&M University on farm, water and energy planning under water uncertainty.
2024.03 Invited talk at the University of Oklahoma: “The Role of Recycling in the Lithium Supply Chain.”
Also in 2024
2024 Congratulations to the lab’s 2024 graduates: Sanjeev Joshi, Syed Mufid, Shraddha Varekar and Eshwara Prasad Sridhar (MS), and Baseel Atallah, Tara Chandrakasem, Dylan Hoang and Anne Nguyen (undergraduate).
2024 Dr. Jones co-authored IEEE Power & Energy Society report TR-124, Enabling Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Through Grid Modernization.
2024 The City of Dallas funded a lab study of its pavement repair queueing system.
2023
Teacher training in green building assessment at ASEE Gulf Southwest, March 2023
Installing the lab’s rooftop solar array, October 2023
Fall 2023
2023.11 Dr. Jones spoke on a grid resilience panel at IEEE PES Latin America in San Juan.
2023.10 Dr. Jones chaired the Energy cluster at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix.
2023.09 New paper in Energies reviewing energy poverty research. Dr. Jones guest-edited an Energies special issue on energy poverty.
Summer 2023
2023.06 Dr. Jones spoke on the “Finding your way in Macro-Energy Systems” panel at the International Energy Workshop in Golden, CO.
Spring 2023
2023.05 Dr. Jones presented energy supply chain research at the IISE Annual Conference in New Orleans.
2023.03 Dr. Jones presented teacher training in green building assessment at ASEE Gulf Southwest (with RET teachers), and spoke at the North Texas Climate Change Symposium.
Also in 2023
2023 Dr. Jones joined Powerhouse Texas’s Energy Policy Advisory Council (2023–2025).
2023 Sarasadat Alavi and Oluwatosin Atitebi joined the lab as PhD students, and Toryon Evans joined as a GEM Fellow.
2023 New awards: • the Lemelson Foundation/ASEE Engineering for One Planet Institutionalization grant (PI) • a City of Dallas Green Warriors weatherization pilot (PI) • a DOD workforce program on advanced electrical power systems (Co-PI), home of the HESM project
2022
At the IISE Annual Conference, Seattle, May 2022
Battery modules for the lab’s microgrid, November 2022
Fall 2022
2022.10 Dr. Jones spoke in the INFORMS Annual Meeting’s New Faculty Colloquium and its Energy Equity flash session in Indianapolis.
Summer 2022
2022.08 New paper in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition on multi-phase CO₂ capture and storage deployment.
Spring 2022
2022.05 Dr. Jones took part in the IISE New Faculty Colloquium in Seattle and presented farm climate-risk optimization.
Also in 2022
2022 Congratulations to Suman Gudikandula (MS), the lab’s first graduate.
2022 Raziye Aghapour joined the lab as a PhD student. Dr. Jones was named a UTA Service Learning Fellow and a FANS Fellow, and received a Lemelson/ASEE Engineering for One Planet mini-grant.
2021
At the INFORMS Annual Meeting, Anaheim, October 2021
Fall 2021
2021.10 New paper in Environment Systems and Decisions on managing farm climate risk with alternative electricity and water. A new IEEE GHTC paper covered community solar for low- and moderate-income households in ERCOT. Dr. Jones chaired an agricultural applications session at INFORMS in Anaheim.
2021.09 New paper in Frontiers in Future Transportation on last-mile COVID-19 distribution.
Summer 2021
2021.08 Dr. Jones joined UTA’s Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering department, and the SEAR Lab began. The lab’s work in the NSF RET Site on sustainable and resilient urban infrastructure began.
Awards and fellowships
2025 INFORMS MIF Early Career Award, Honorable Mention
2024 Faculty Applied Clean Energy Sciences (FACES) Fellow, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (U.S. Department of Energy)
2024 Energy and Climate Tech-Innovation Policy Bootcamp Fellow (Bipartisan Policy Institute; George Mason School of Policy and Government; University of Maryland School of Public Policy)
2023–2025 Energy Policy Advisory Council, Powerhouse Texas
2022 Service Learning Fellow, UT Arlington
2022 Faculty Advisory Sustainability Network (FANS) Fellow, UT Arlington
2020 Mickey Leland Energy Fellowship, U.S. Department of Energy
2019–2021 National Research Traineeship, INFEWS Scholar Program, National Science Foundation
2017–2021 GEM Fellowship, The National GEM Consortium
