Dr. AFM Kamal Chowdhury was a postdoctoral scholarK in the Clean Energy Transformation Lab of Environmental Studies Program at the University of California Santa Barbara during 2020-2021. He is now an Associate Research Scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute, University of Maryland.

At CETlab, Kamal’s research focused on the impacts of climate change and weather-dependent renewables on the hydropower and broader electricity systems in Southern Africa, India, and other regions. Before CETlab, he was based in Singapore where he assessed the effects of hydro-climatic variability on the hydropower production at Southeast Asian river basins (Mekong, Chao Phraya, Irrawaddy) and operations of national/interconnected (Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar) electricity systems. Kamal is enthusiastic to develop tools to simulate and optimize engineering systems. He developed PowNet, a unit commitment economic dispatch model for large-scale power systems analysis. He also contributed to develop VIC-Res and VIC-ResOpt, the hydrological models for simulation and optimization of reservoir operations. Kamal’s PhD work contributed to a stochastic rainfall simulator, known as Decadal and Hierarchical Markov Chain (DHMC) model.  He completed PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Newcastle, Australia in 2017, followed by a summer research fellowship in the Australian National University. In 2018-2020, Kamal worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore. Before that, he conducted several teaching and consultancy assignments in Bangladesh and Australia.