Research
The work is organised by three layers of infrastructure. The physical layer does the work, the digital layer records and models it, and the institutional layer decides what it is for and who it serves. Hernando de Soto's example is a house: the house is physical, its recorded title is digital, and the lender who takes the risk, and the court that makes it safe to, are institutional.
Each category below opens its projects, and every project has its own page with its papers and people.
Physical · Digital · Institutional · The labs
Physical
The roads, ports, pipelines, power lines and factories that move people, energy and materials and make what a society uses.
- Critical Minerals and Supply Chains 7 projects →
From mine to battery and back: black-mass recovery at the bench, and the supply-chain and trade-policy models around it.
- Lab Energy System 3 projects →
The lab's rooftop solar, electricity use and building loads, collected and controlled as a live dataset.
- Microgrids and Second-Life Batteries 2 projects →
Microgrids built from repurposed electric-vehicle batteries, and systems engineering for mobile microgrid testbeds.
- Manufacturing, Robotics and Automation 2 projects →
Drones and lean-manufacturing modules that students build, test and document.
- RFID, Auto-ID and Digital Twins 2 projects →
Radio tags that turn physical presence into records people can act on: lab equipment, inventory and naloxone kits.
Digital
The records, measures and models that physical systems depend on and institutions decide from. They make those flows visible, accountable and optimizable.
- Energy Systems and Grid Analytics 4 projects →
How Texas's grid and wider energy system change over decades: ERCOT, ReEDS and GCAM scenarios, distributed energy, electric vehicles, and geothermal on legacy wells.
- AI and Computational Methods 4 projects →
Quantum and other emerging computing approaches to planning problems.
- Geospatial and Infrastructure Analysis 3 projects →
Maps of where services, property value and rooftop solar sit, from census tracts to parcels.
- Transportation and Mobility 1 project →
Shared self-driving fleets and high-speed rail for taking carbon out of travel.
- Food, Energy and Water Systems 1 project →
Planning power and water together for homes and farms, under an uncertain climate.
Institutional
The laws, policies and organisations that protect people, enforce agreements and decide who builds, who pays and who benefits.
- Green Building and Energy Efficiency 3 projects →
Green building research with K–12 teachers, grid-interactive homes with NREL, and household energy affordability.
- Education, Outreach and Workforce 1 project →
Helping faculty across UT Arlington build sustainability into the courses they already teach.
- Community and Policy Analytics 1 project →
Public-health logistics and public-sector analytics, such as planning how scarce COVID-19 treatments reach the people who need them.
The labs
SEAR — Sustainable and Efficient Allocation of Resources
The SEAR Lab studies energy and critical mineral systems and the communities they serve, end to end and back: from extraction through manufacturing and deployment to end-of-life recovery. It is part of an interdisciplinary ecosystem that includes RAID, COSMOS (the Center for Stochastic Modeling, Optimization, and Statistics) and the Pulsed Power Energy Lab.
The lab's own site, searlab.uta.edu, lists the team and what is running now, and is the place to ask about joining.
RAID — Radio Frequency and Auto-ID Lab
The RAID Lab is one of the most comprehensively equipped RFID research facilities in the country, with dedicated healthcare, logistics and digital twin research cells. Its conviction: what cannot be tracked cannot be managed, and what cannot be managed cannot be improved. Its work spans:
- Pharmaceutical supply chain tracking from manufacturer to patient, to prevent diversion and counterfeiting
- Smart pills: ingestible, biocompatible RFID sensors for in-vivo monitoring
- RFID systems that prevent retained surgical instruments
- RTLS patient and medication tracking with smart shelves, wristbands and hospital bedding
- Materials tracking for the International Space Station
- Methods: tag and antenna characterization, set-cover optimization for reader placement, GIS spatial analytics, and machine learning for anomaly detection, a stack now being adapted to community-level naloxone distribution
The lab's own site, rfid.uta.edu, covers its facilities, projects and team.