Jennifer Schmidt
University of Alaska Anchorage, AK·Earth & Environmental Science
Cold northern places face hazards and opportunities that much of the country rarely considers. These include heavy snow that can crush buildings and the question of whether electric vehicles can work in extreme cold.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
Social Science
- Topics
snow load
urban snow modeling
WRF-Urban
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Dec 2028
What they work on
- Improve urban snow prediction in Anchorage using an enhanced WRF-Urban atmosphere–urban–land-surface model, so that rooftop snow-load warnings reflect conditions in the city rather than in distant mountain stations.
- Quantify the link between ground-based snowpack measurements and snow loads on municipal rooftops, with high school students helping collect snowpack data, and examine how residents perceive and mitigate risk.
- Measure and model the efficiency and performance of commercially available electric vehicles, including off-road EVs, operating below −30 °C in Kotzebue and Galena, Alaska.
- Assess how EV charging affects remote Arctic diesel microgrids and how electric rates and policy choices shape EV uptake and charging, applying the transportation acceptance model to study community receptiveness.
More about the research
Two projects in Alaska combine physical modeling and social science. They ask how communities can stay safe and resilient as conditions change, and what local people need for new approaches to work.
Why it matters
Better urban snow models and rooftop load data could give Anchorage residents and businesses clearer warnings on when to clear roofs, helping prevent building collapses and deaths in snowy cities. Data on EV performance in extreme cold, microgrid impacts and policy effects could help rural Alaskan and tribal communities, utilities and policymakers decide whether EVs can provide cleaner, affordable transport.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zhaomiao Guo
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Engineering·Early-career
Develop network models of how decentralized transportation and power system stakeholders with incomplete information interact across space and time as electric vehicles and clean energy expand.
Di Shi
New Mexico State University, NM·Engineering
Model multi-scale climate dynamics, including flooding, drought and temperature extremes, and link them to sociodemographic energy maps of three rural communities.
Deng Cao
Central State University, OH·Engineering
Design a coordinated strategy for connected self-driving vehicles to decide when to send perception tasks to roadside edge computers, keeping the decisions manageable as vehicle numbers grow and robust to uncertain edge behavior.
The school
University of Alaska Anchorage: 4 labs on PI Pages, $25M a year on research, 3 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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