Doctoral Student Awarded Best Student Paper Best Student Paper Award at IISE Annual Conference

ISE doctoral student Michael Beacher expects to receive his PhD in the summer of 2025. He is the recipient of the Best Student Paper Award in the Energy Systems Division at the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Annual Conference held in Montreal this past May.

His paper, “Assessing the Public Health Impacts: A Comprehensive Analysis of Health Externalities Related to Power Grid Expansion Plans,” is, he says, “explicitly included in his dissertation and acts as a base for much of my remaining research.”

Beacher’s research addresses the interaction between long-term energy policy and human health damages. “This paper was about our initial work in creating a generation expansion planning model and framework for studying that interaction,” he states. “We analyzed several potential energy policy scenarios to ultimately show that health damages can severely impact overall policy achievement costs.”

Beacher, who will be joining the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as a senior research scientist after finishing his PhD, especially values the versatility of ISE. “What you learn can be applied in so many contexts,” he explains. “I’ve used classical ISE methods and concepts in everything from physics simulations to modeling housing and food insecurity.”