Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief:
Professor Carlos F. M. Coimbra
Prof. Coimbra is the Co-Director of the Center of Excellence in Renewable Resource Integration (CERRI) and the Associate Director of the Center for Energy Research (CER) at UC San Diego. He joined the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego in July of 2011 after serving for 5 years as the founding chairman of the graduate program in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at UC Merced. At UC San Diego he served as Chairman of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from 2017 to 2020. Prof. Coimbra has also served on multiple editorial boards for several energy related journals in the past decade, and has received multiple best paper awards for both journal and conference contributions. Several of his papers are among the most-cited contributions in the renewable energy field in the past 10 years. He has been also recognized multiple times for research mentorship of university students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Prof. Coimbra has authored more than 100 journal papers, the vast majority of them with his students and direct research affiliates, and an equivalent number of conference presentations and invited talks. He is also the co-author (with Prof. Anthony F. Mills at UCLA) of a popular series of (4) textbooks on Heat and Mass Transfer that is adopted by some of the best science and engineering programs worldwide.
Research Interests: Prof. Coimbra is an internationally-recognized leader in the field of renewable energy integration, resourcing and forecasting. His best-known contributions include pioneering work on the development of hybrid forecast engines that combine physical models of the gaseous and condensed constituents of the atmosphere with remote sensing, local meteorological and radiometric telemetry to produce high-fidelity, concatenated solar and wind forecasts for a wide range of temporal horizons. Prof. Coimbra and collaborators pioneered the use of multiple data science methodologies (big data mining, machine/stochastic learning, clustering, etc.) to optimize low-latency, real-time forecasting engines that have since been deployed operationally to integrate some of the largest weather-dependent power plants in the world to the grid. He is also well-known for his contributions to variable order modeling of complex behavior, including multiphase flows, nonlinear dynamics and radiative dispersion. His group's main research interests include heat and mass transfer in multiphase flows, radiative transfer in participating media, radiative properties, stochastic modeling of nonlinear phenomena, real-time forecasting, variable order methods, atmospheric (including cloud) physics, energy meteorology, and energy climatology.
Professional Activities: Carlos has contributed widely to the publication landscape in the general area of energy and thermal sciences. He has been a member of the Editorial Boards of Elsevier's Progress in Energy and Combustion Science (2012-2015), Solar Energy (2015-2018), Renewable Energy (2015-2018), of ASME's Journal of Solar Energy Engineering (2015-2018), and also of Springer Nature's Scientific Reports, and has been an active member of several professional societies (ASME, AIAA, AMS, ISES, etc.), and is a life member of AGU.
Deputy Editor:
Professor Kleissl researches the interaction of weather with engineering systems in buildings, solar power systems, and the electric power grid. Kleissl's solar variability models, sky imager solar forecasting tools, and numerical weather prediction solar forecasts have been commercialized or used operationally to advance solar power integration. Kleissl received an undergraduate degree from the University of Stuttgart and a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, both in environmental engineering with a focus in environmental fluid mechanics. He is the Associate Director of the UC San Diego Center for Energy Research, Professor and Vice-Chair in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Co-Director of the Center of Excellence in Renewable Resource Integration (CERRI), all at UC San Diego.
In a text mining review article of the top 1000 citations in solar forecasting, Yang et al. (2018) found that Kleissl had by far the most solar forecasting papers globally. Kleissl has published over 100 papers in the top journals of solar power resources, forecasting, and integration. Kleissl and his students and postdocs developed one of the first and most successful PV variability models for large solar power plants. The model has been released open source in Sandia National Lab's PV-Lib toolbox and used by 100s of researchers and practitioners globally. Kleissl also pioneered the field of sky imager forecasting and developed some of the most advanced physics-based modeling tools for sky imagery. In numerical weather prediction, Kleissl's group specializes in Stratocumulus clouds and their representation in simple and complex models of the atmosphere.Recently Kleissl focused on PV integration into electric distribution systems and developed optimal voltage control techniques for smart solar PV inverters. Because of his contributions to the field, Kleissl was invited to edit a book on Solar Energy Forecasting and Resource Assessment, which appeared in 2013 and has become the principal book in the field. As one of three US members, Kleissl was invited to serve on the International Energy Agency (IEA) PVPS Task 16 workgroup.
In 2012 Kleissl became Associate Editor and in 2015 Subject Editor for Solar Resources and Energy Meteorology for the Solar Energy Journal, where he handled over 1,200 articles and was recognized for efficiency, impartiality, and quality. In 2017 Kleissl was invited to act as guest editor-in-chief for the Solar Energy Journal special issue “Advances in Solar Resource Assessment and Forecasting” that was published in July 2018.
Professor Cal investigates the interaction between wind plants and solar farms with the environment with the aim of understanding the coupling between turbulence fluid mechanics and energy production. Cal is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Portland State University; a faculty member since 2010. Cal received his B.S. M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His Ph.D. focused on experimentally explaining the influence of imposed external effects on turbulent boundary layers. Cal was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University to develop experiments concerning wind plants and their mechanism for extracting energy from a fluid mechanics perspective. He received a Ford Foundation Fellowship from the National Academies. Cal has researched on low-order modeling and stochastic processes with an important focus on data science for wind power, and strategic ways to improve wind energy production through strategies like rotor counter-rotation, plant layout, tilt/yaw to name a few. On the field of solar energy, Cal has labored on pinpointing the relationship between the heat transfer coefficient as it pertains to the efficiency and energy yield of utility-scale solar farms. Beyond the areas of renewable energy systems, Cal has performed research on volcanic plumes, forest canopies, and multi-phase flows. Cal was part of the Fulbright Scholar Program on topics regarding the former. In 2019, Cal joined JRSE as an associate editor. Cal is an active member of professional societies (APS-DFD, AIAA, ASME, AGU, etc.).
Professor Gerardo Diaz received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame. After gaining industrial experience in Research & Development in the automotive and aerospace industries, he joined the Mechanical Engineering program at University California, Merced in 2005 as a founding member of the faculty. He was the Graduate Chair of the program from 2011 to 2013 and from 2018 to 2020. He is currently the director of the Sustainable Plasma Gasification lab and was co-director of the UC Solar Institute until 2019.
Author of the book “Voltage-Enhanced Processing of Biomass and Biochar,” Diaz was appointed Research Member in the Biochar Research Advisory Group for the Governor's Office of Planning and Research in 2017. He is also internationally recognized for his contributions and analysis of minichannel technology in low and medium temperature solar thermal applications.
Professor Diaz’s research now focuses on the sustainable conversion and application of renewable energy resources. He has investigated the performance and thermal control of biomass reactors for pyrolysis, gasification, and plasma-assisted thermochemical processes for a wide range of production scales. His work includes the study of the material properties and applications of biochar and activated carbon as circular-economy materials for GHG-emission reduction, soil amendment, solar desalination, wastewater-treatment plant streams, and the construction industry. Professor Diaz’s research approaches cover experimental as well as computational methods including data-driven techniques such as artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, vector autoregression, and fractional and variable order models.
Having been an editor for several ASME journals in engineering, Professor Diaz joined Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy in 2020 as Associate Editor and is now Deputy Editor of biofuels, bioenergy, thermal conversion, and circular-economy.
Associate Editors:
Verónica Bermúdez-Benito
QEERI, Doha, Qatar
Jamie Bright
Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS)
National University of Singapore (NUS)
Leonardo Chamorro
Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Dennice Gayme
Whiting School of Engineering
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
Nicholas Hamilton
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, Colorado, USA
Bri-Mathias Hodge
Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering
University of Colorado Boulder, CO, USA
Giacomo Valerio Iungo
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Texas, Dallas, USA
Mengying Li
Department of Mechanical Engineering
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Torben Mikkelsen
Department of Wind Energy
Technical University of Denmark, Risø, Denmark
Hugo Pedro
Center for Energy Research
University of California, San Diego, USA
Joakim Widén
Uppsala University, Sweden
Michael Woodhouse
Solar PV Technologies and Economics Analyst
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, Colorado, USA