Student to Student: A Conversation with Ramboll Industrial PhD Candidate, Rei Zhang
Two years ago, the Ramboll Foundation, the UC Berkeley Nordic Center, and the Center for Responsible Business established a long-term partnership to bolster global research and education opportunities that highlight unique ownership models of enterprise foundations. Separately, Ramboll and UC Berkeley also established the first-ever Ramboll industrial PhD program. An industrial PhD is typically a 3-4 year doctoral program that bridges academic research with topics a particular industry confronts. I sat down with Rei Zhang, a compassionate first-year PhD engineering candidate, to learn about her unique experience as the first-ever Ramboll industrial PhD candidate.
Rei plans to focus her research on air quality and air quality modeling, an interest born from her undergraduate research thesis where she found a measurable pollution difference from car activities before and after COVID shutdowns. She realized her findings created trajectories to reduce urban air pollution. That’s what led her to work for the global engineering, architecture, and environmental consultancy firm, Ramboll.
After completing her civil and environmental engineering degree at Princeton University, Rei joined Ramboll’s environmental consulting team as an air quality consultant. Her team’s clients varied greatly, ranging from companies wanting to reduce their emissions to governmental agencies investing in residential air quality sensing. One notable experience she enjoyed was helping assess future health risks for the entire city of San Francisco.
She highlighted that while consulting allows you to work on various projects, due to a number of constraints like project scope and time, sometimes you can’t dive deeper into one particular topic you personally might be interested in. After consulting at Ramboll for 4 years, Rei was able to take advantage of this new opportunity Ramboll and UC Berkeley had created to deepen her technical and academic skills through this industrial PhD program.
Currently, Rei is working on optimizing the resolution of chemical transport models used in air quality prediction and forecasting. These models tend to be coded programs that predict how chemical pollutants move and change in the atmosphere and support environmental policy evaluation. The impact Rei hopes to have is on creating more accessible and accurate tools for environmental organizations, firms, and policymakers decision-making.
Conclusion
After my conversation with Rei, my own perception of the relationship between academia and industry was redefined. Rei showed me a new way to bring your expertise into academic research to help solve some of our society’s most pressing challenges. As a transfer student, I’m familiar with ‘unconventional’ routes to success and I think her story is truly inspiring. If you’re interested in pursuing a graduate degree, I encourage you to learn more about industrial PhDs. There’s no set path for success. All you need to do is be open to explore.
About the author: Kai-Chen Liao is a third year Haas undergraduate transfer student. Kai is a student assistant with the CRB and member of the Haas Business Student Association.
