Six projects, one throughline: resilience that communities can use.

The Challenge

The Rockaway peninsula sits on the front line of coastal storm risk. Hurricane-driven flooding and prolonged grid outages have repeatedly cut power to homes, small businesses, and critical facilities in a community with limited local generation and a single point of dependence on the wider transmission network. Restoring service after each event is slow and costly, and residents carry the consequences. The question was whether a community-scale microgrid could deliver credible, financeable resilience — and whether it could survive the scrutiny of a competitive state funding process.

Approach & Solution

• Framed the study around community-scale microgrids and distributed energy resources as a locally controllable electricity supply during hurricanes, flooding, and other natural hazards.
• Investigated NYSERDA microgrid program requirements in detail and mapped the technical, financial, environmental, and implementation criteria the project would be judged against.
• Evaluated the full renewable portfolio — solar photovoltaics, wind, geothermal, and other distributed generation — against local siting, load, and flood-exposure constraints.
• Built the feasibility case: load and generation assessment, infrastructure and environmental considerations, and economic analysis of build and operating scenarios.
• Rebuilt and stress-tested project cost estimates, then recommended adjustments that materially improved the proposal's standing against selection criteria.
• Conducted community surveys and stakeholder research across the Rockaways to capture resilience priorities, critical loads, and local energy needs directly from residents.
• Collaborated with a multidisciplinary team spanning infrastructure engineering, environmental systems, economics, and community planning.

Results

• Delivered a complete feasibility assessment, technical documentation, and funding materials supporting the microgrid proposal.
• Produced revised cost estimates and competitiveness recommendations that strengthened alignment with NYSERDA project-selection criteria.
• Translated resident survey findings into prioritized critical-load and resilience requirements that shaped the technical design.
• Established a repeatable evaluation framework applicable to other flood-exposed coastal communities.

The Challenge

Hospitals cannot lose power. Yet major New York City medical facilities rely heavily on diesel backup generation with finite fuel supply — a vulnerability exposed whenever regional outages extend beyond a day. Administrators needed to understand whether rooftop solar paired with microgrid controls could add genuine resilience and emissions benefit, or whether structural, spatial, and financial constraints made it impractical.

Approach & Solution

• Assessed rooftop capacity, available array area, and realistic generation potential across candidate hospital sites.
• Evaluated microgrid configurations capable of supporting emergency and critical loads independently of the wider grid.
• Weighed reliability gains, renewable energy adoption, and infrastructure resilience against installation cost and site constraints.
• Supported feasibility analysis, project cost assessment, and proposal development for stakeholder review.
• Coordinated across engineering, environmental, and facilities perspectives to keep recommendations operationally grounded.

Results

• Produced a clear comparative view of rooftop solar and microgrid options for critical healthcare infrastructure.
• Quantified the resilience contribution of on-site renewable generation alongside existing emergency power systems.
• Delivered cost and feasibility inputs that made proposals defensible to decision-makers and funders.

The Challenge

New York's combined sewer system overflows during heavy rain, discharging untreated runoff into local waterways. Green infrastructure — bioswales, rain gardens, permeable surfaces — is the city's frontline mitigation, but installed assets only deliver value if they actually perform under real storm conditions. Performance data, not design intent, determines whether investment is working.

Approach & Solution

• Applied hydrology and environmental engineering principles to monitor installed green infrastructure stormwater systems.
• Analyzed infiltration and retention performance against surrounding environmental and site conditions.
• Documented findings in technical form suitable for infrastructure performance assessment and asset management decisions.

Results

• Generated an evidence base on how green infrastructure assets perform in field conditions rather than design assumptions.
• Identified environmental and site factors influencing measured performance, informing maintenance and siting judgment.

The Challenge

Urban soils in Brooklyn carry a legacy of lead contamination, elevated salinity, and disturbed pH — conditions that limit safe reuse of open space and complicate greening projects. Conventional remediation is expensive and disruptive. The research question was whether plant-based, ecologically driven remediation could measurably improve contaminated urban soil, and how site conditions at locations such as Greenwood Cemetery should be characterized before intervention.

Approach & Solution

• Supervised a team of interns conducting phytoremediation and earthworm-based soil remediation research.
• Trained the team in soil testing protocols, experimental procedure, data collection, and remediation technique.
• Ran pH, salinity, XRF, hydrometer, and organic-content analyses, managing sample intake, drying, preparation, and record-keeping end to end.
• Applied environmental geotechnology and remediation principles to on-site soil quality assessment and strategy evaluation.
• Maintained quality-control procedures and complete technical documentation across the research cycle.

Results

• Reduced lead contamination, modified soil pH, and cut soil salinity by up to 40 percent within two months.
• Built a trained research team capable of executing consistent testing protocols independently.
• Contributed to a roughly 30 percent increase in external, non-college clients as the laboratory expanded its services.
• Delivered site-specific soil quality assessment and remediation recommendations grounded in measured data.

The Challenge

Infrastructure and climate programs routinely miss the residents who need them most because planners lack a clear spatial picture of who lives where. New York's immigrant and international populations are distributed unevenly across boroughs, with language access and service needs that citywide averages obscure entirely.

Approach & Solution

• Used ArcMap GIS to map population distribution and demographic patterns across New York City.
• Applied spatial analysis to examine relationships between population characteristics and urban geography.
• Structured the outputs to support planning conversations rather than sit as static cartography.

Results

• Produced spatial analysis revealing concentration patterns relevant to outreach, language access, and service targeting.
• Created a reusable analytical basis for equity-aware infrastructure and program planning.

The Challenge

Clean energy investment is accelerating, but the residents of low-income and underserved communities — the people most exposed to climate risk — are frequently left outside both the decision-making and the job pipeline. Awareness gaps, language barriers, and the absence of trusted messengers keep participation low even where programs exist.

Approach & Solution

• Secured funding through the EPC to underwrite environmental education and climate resilience programming.
• Established a climate resilience education program in collaboration with the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC).
• Designed and facilitated environmental workforce and career-awareness workshops targeted to underserved residents.
• Translated climate resilience, sustainability, and clean-energy concepts into accessible presentations and educational materials, drawing on trilingual English, Mandarin, and Cantonese communication.
• Coordinated community partners and stakeholders through implementation, outreach, and documentation.

Results

• Launched a funded, partner-backed climate resilience education program from concept to delivery.
• Expanded clean energy career awareness among residents historically excluded from the sector.
• Built durable relationships with community organizations and institutional partners that extend program reach.