Sonia Martin

I was born and raised in Pacifica and have lived in the Bay Area all my life. Living by the ocean, I spent a lot of time outside, engaged in a lot of hands-on learning, and felt in tune with the environment. In high school I participated in a technical arts program, where I loved working with wood and metal. When it came time to look at colleges and programs, it was my parents who suggested I consider engineering – they told me that it was all about math and science and working with my hands – all the things I loved. Once I started, I never looked back.

Today I study the integration of electrified transportation and the grid. Transportation is a major contributor to global warming, and people aren’t going to stop driving, or taking trains or buses. The problem we face is that electric vehicles must be plugged in to charge them, and the grid was not originally planned to accommodate everyone driving home and plugging their cars in. It’s a combination of old infrastructure that needs to be upgraded and all sorts of distributed energy resources, such as batteries, electric vehicles, and solar. This all involves a lot of planning to operate. We have a lot of problems to overcome, and the future is very uncharted.

I create electrical engineering-based models of electric vehicles, and use data science to look at various aspects of the grid, the price of electricity, and driver behavior – when people are driving, charging, commuting, etc. I’m trying to understand what all this is going to look like in the future, including the impact of electric vehicles on upgrading grid infrastructure, the incorporation of varied energy resources, and the shift of the grid toward clean energy.

The grid – with its multitude of energy resources – currently is under a lot of manual control, but in the future much more will be autonomously controlled by algorithms informed by factors like people’s driving habits, changing weather conditions that impact clean energy production, and anticipated electricity demand.

I’m now starting the fifth year of my PhD. In my first year I couldn’t form a problem or research question very well. Now I can see a data set or read a paper and form a problem that perhaps hasn’t been solved in a particular way yet. I know what tools to use to attack it and how to present my work. I love that my research is interdisciplinary; I’m in mechanical engineering and my Stanford Sustainable Systems Lab is in the civil and environmental engineering department. But if you asked me what work I do, I’d say electrical engineering, along with a lot of data science. My research spans a lot of engineering fields, and I feel like that’s a unique Stanford thing.

I’m not sure if my future lies in academia, industry, or perhaps a national lab, but the problems I work on are really interesting, and I plan to stay with them.