Magdalena Klemun is an assistant research professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering and a member of the Ralph S. O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute. Her research explores how energy technologies and systems change as a function of investments in technological innovation, with a particular interest in understanding relationships between technology design and performance evolution. Klemun’s research aims to enable more targeted climate innovation efforts, improve the availability of explanatory information about technology trends to enhance road mapping, engineering design, and policy development, and advance theories of technological change.
Current research areas in her lab—the Deployment Lab —focus on advancing data-driven frameworks to study the evolution of energy policies and technologies, including both hardware and “soft technologies” (the knowledge and codified practices used during processes of technology design, installation, permitting, community engagement, use, and end-of-life management); informing policies and technology design to accelerate industry decarbonization and manage the environmental impacts of advanced digitalization; and developing technology-level metrics to support sustainable development. Klemun’s research has been featured in journals such as Nature Energy, Nature Communications, Joule, iScience, and Environmental Research Letters.
Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Klemun was an assistant professor in the Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Before earning her PhD, she was a power grid analyst with energy consultancy GTM Research in New York.
Klemun earned her BS in electrical engineering and information technology from Vienna University of Technology, her MS in earth resources engineering from Columbia University, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar, and a PhD from the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.