A $500 award won for outstanding research is going straight back into building the CEE research community.
Yi Ju (PhD ’26), Lunlong Li, Jingchun Wang (MS ’26), and Professor Scott Moura (BS ’06) were recently awarded the ASME Energy Systems Technical Committee Best Paper Award at the 2026 American Control Conference. Rather than keeping the monetary prize, the team donated the entire $500 gift to the CEE department to support the eMERGE seminar series—specifically funding light breakfasts and refreshments to encourage in-person attendance and casual networking among students, postdocs, and speakers.
“I have learned enormously from our eMERGE speakers—not only from their presentations and research framing, but especially from the conversations that happen in person,” said Ju.
Founded by Ju in Fall 2025, eMERGE (early-career Mobility & Energy Researchers’ Group Exchange) provides a platform for early-career researchers while inspiring the next generation of scholars. In its inaugural year, eMERGE hosted 21 seminars featuring researchers from 13 institutions worldwide, growing its network to over 120 scholars and sparking real-world mentorships and collaborations across campuses. Beyond public-facing talks, the platform creates valuable opportunities for speakers to engage informally with the Berkeley research community.
Building on this community momentum, eMERGE is now organized by CEE PhD candidate Aparimit Kasliwal, with faculty guidance from Professors Scott Moura and Marta González. eMERGE kicked off its Fall 2026 season on Monday, September 21, at 10:00 a.m. in 320 Soda Hall, with the opening talk featuring Dr. Mirna Kassem, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley and incoming Assistant Professor at Stanford University. Kassem earned her PhD in GeoSystems Engineering from Berkeley in 2026 under Professor Dimitrios Zekkos presented on “Climate-Driven Landslide Hazard: Enhancing Community Resilience through Physics-Based Regional Simulations”.
This year's lineup features speakers from Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University and other leading institutions in mobility, energy, infrastructure, and sustainability. “It's been a very rewarding start to this great experience and opportunity to organize eMERGE this year, and it's a pleasure to help build a community of early-career researchers here at Berkeley and beyond. We will be joined by Dr Max Ng next week, who’ll be speaking on ‘Redesigning Multimodal Transit Networks With Shared Autonomous Mobility Services’,” said Kasliwal.
For more details and the full upcoming schedule, visit the eMERGE homepage.