Hi, I am Ilse Avalos from Mexico and I applied to be a fellow this year but giving the pandemic, the fellowship was cancelled.

Since my undergraduate degree, I started working part-time in a renewable energy company because I think that the knowledge acquired in the University can be more valuable if you can apply it to real situations and problems. For me, it is important on a project the technical aspect but also learn how to communicate your ideas to the population, that is why that as part of my thesis I developed a dynamic tool that can help to people to understand in a friendly way how much energy they could save in their households with a solar or wind technology with the purpose to contribute on the RE market. My curiosity and desire to understand widely the energy systems gave me the opportunity to be part of the researchers' team of the Mario Molina Centre, where I worked with Dr Mario Molina, here I developed two tools that are used by the Mexican Ministry for Agrarian, Land and Urban Development about the relationship of urbanisation with energy consumption to delimit the urban sprawl regularising or rejecting the contracts for new housing projects that were planned to be far from the city since requiring more infrastructure investment.

On my MSc. I am applying new statistical models and optimization techniques to forecast energy consumption and generation integrating the different types of variables being that the successful policies and regulations are those that during their design include the economic and technical part, but also, the role of people on this process, as well as some behavioural economics and social psychology concepts.

I am a passionate person about social good but also for programming. I can spend happily a lot of time trying to solve problems that I know will be useful for people. I recognise that this pandemic changed our year but I see this as an opportunity to use wisely our skills.