Sakshi Mishra

Sakshi Mishra is an energy researcher, a blockchain student, and a machine learning practitioner. Sakshi is pursuing the University of British Columbia’s Blockchain Graduate Pathway. She is also a Ph.D. student at UBC’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Before joining UBC in 2020, Sakshi was leading the development of an energy decision-making tool named REopt Lite API and spearheaded its open-source effort at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), U.S. Sakshi also led NREL’s Intelligent Campus program's Predictive Analytics wing, where her focus was on developing energy forecasting applications using Deep Learning. She is also an advisor at GreenTech Alliance. Before joining NREL, Sakshi was a Grid Planning Engineer at American Electric Power (AEP) where she conducted full integration analysis for utility-scale renewable (wind and solar) generation plants. She also served as an Industry Advisor for PSERC projects. She holds a Professional Engineer License in the state of California. She worked as a Renewable Energy Engineering Intern at Black and Veatch during the summer of 2015. She received her master’s degree in Energy Science Technology and Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, U.S. (2015) as an academic excellence awardee and bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from VIT University (2014), India. She was the recipient of the Energy Service Project Award for her outstanding academic performance in the EST&P program at CMU. She has also received the ‘The Cleantech Innovator’ award (2020) from the Clean Energy Leadership Institute (CELI) in the United States and NREL’s Chairman’s Award for Exceptional Performance (2020).

Research Interest:

I am interested in exploring blockchain’s application in the sustainability domain – energy systems specifically. As more and more distributed energy resources (like rooftop solar and battery storage) are getting deployed, peer-to-peer energy trading is a timely application of blockchain especially given the influx of electric vehicles needing more coordination from the distribution grid side, as its penetration grows further. Distributed energy networks –– where each actor (i.e. building) sells and buys energy for optimizing its own energy costs and at the same time group of buildings (or connected microgrids) optimizing for the overall energy efficiency –– have tremendous potential to utilize blockchain and smart contracts for energy transactions.

I am primarily interested in hands-on distributed blockchain application development. I also welcome the opportunities to work as part of interdisciplinary teams working on solidifying the business value of blockchain applications.