UT SIAM Chapter Treasurer Awarded 2023 Student Certificate

Xin Tang, third-year PhD CSEM student at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences is the 2023 recipient of the SIAM Student Chapter Certificate, awarded in recognition of a student’s service and contributions. Tang has served as the local chapter’s treasurer since coming to The University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2020. Student chapters operate under the umbrella of the larger Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) organization.

“My undergrad advisor at my previous institution introduced me to SIAM, so I was very excited when I learned that we had a student chapter here. Applied math is so broad and interdisciplinary, sometimes students are just not very clear about it. Having a student chapter provides opportunities to learn about this field from graduate students, seminars and discussions. It is also a great platform for students with the same interest to exchange ideas,” said Tang, who began working in the Process and Energy Systems Engineering Group with Michael Baldea in 2021. Baldea is a core faculty member at the Oden Institute and Associate Professor in the chemical engineering department.

Some of the accomplishments Tang has collaborated on with SIAM officers include working with a website designer to revamp their website in 2020 which improved user access, and initiating speaker invitations for seminars which are open to all in the Oden community.

“Industrial seminars aim to give students more ideas of what applied math can do and what accomplishments can be achieved with it. In 2021, we started an Applied Math Mentorship Program, where undergrads are paired with graduate and postdoc students, along with professors for support on projects, course and career advice. We try our best to match mentor/mentee interests and respond to feedback.”

The research Tang is collaborating on at the Institute focuses on optimization of energy systems. This is an issue that hits close to home for many Texans who have experienced power system imbalances across the state over the last several years.

“Specifically, we focus on demand bidding models for energy systems. As a result of an increased contribution of renewable energy sources (RES) (including solar, wind, hydro energy etc.) to the electricity generation portfolio, the variability and uncertainty of power generation resource availability in the power grid have increased significantly during recent years. The increased variability in the power system makes balancing power generation and demand more challenging.”

Price-based demand response programs partially address this problem by incentivizing (large) users to reduce their consumption during peak net load periods, likely shifting their demand to periods of lower net load. “Demand bidding has the potential to improve controllability and predictability as large electricity consumers submit electricity load bids to the grid and adjust consumption during critical time intervals. In addition, demand bidding allows the consumers to take control of their own electricity costs.” Tang anticipates following a career path in a similar field upon completion of her degree.

The UT SIAM Chapter, which was founded in 2008, generally meets biweekly. For more information about the group and to join, follow the link here. SIAM student chapters promote applied mathematics and computational science to young mathematicians and scientists around the world.