DeCarolis Receives NSF Award

Dr. Joseph F. DeCarolis, assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation.

The NSF Career Award, one of the highest honors for young faculty in science and engineering, will provide $400,795 in funding over five years to support DeCarolis’s research project, Modeling for Insights with an Open Source Energy Economy Optimization Model.

Computer modeling can help quantify how actions or events, such as oil price spikes or climate policy implementation, may affect economic and environmental outcomes, such as gasoline prices or greenhouse gas emissions. DeCarolis will use an open source framework he and his students created to give researchers and educators access to model source code and data as well as open source modeling tools.

His goals include generating new insights at the national and global levels, creating easy-to-use decision support tools and using the models to teach students from high school to graduate school how to think critically about energy systems and environmental sustainability.

Prior to joining NC State 2008, DeCarolis was an environmental scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development. He received a bachelor’s degree in 2000 from Clark University, majoring in both physics and environmental science and policy. He earned a Ph.D. in engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004.