Meet the Expert: Constance Crozier

The assistant professor in industrial engineering brings a math and computer science-rooted background to fundamental challenges as the world moves away from fossil fuels.

Constance Crozier fell into her field of research almost by chance.

Having loved math for as long as she can remember, she could never get enough of it. In her early days of undergraduate engineering studies at Oxford, Crozier was so into the subject that she always picked the modules with the most mathematical content.

After a while though, Crozier realized she wanted to apply her formidable math skills to solve real-world problems. It was when she was discussing this dilemma with her master’s advisor at Oxford that he recommended routing her passion for mathematics to fields he was working on: electrification and sustainability as applied to the power grid. Having struggled with electrical engineering concepts in her early undergraduate studies, Crozier was understandably wary. “I didn’t do well with circuits but [my advisor] assured me that I had to have some background knowledge about the electricity grid and understand the equations but I wouldn’t touch any components,” Crozier laughs. It was the beginning of her extensive work in power grids.

Today, Crozier explores topics at the intersection of industrial engineering and decarbonized power systems at Georgia Tech.

From math to industrial engineering

Crozier grew up in southeast London—her claim to fame, she jokes, is that the hospital she was born in, is almost exactly on the meridian line. Noticing Crozier’s strong inclination for math and science in school, a mother’s engineer friend nudged her toward engineering. “She told me I could do engineering math and physics and it would be more application-driven,” Crozier remembers.

Sold on the idea of pursuing her favorite subjects as an undergraduate, Crozier applied to Oxford suspecting she might have a better chance of admission than the sister school with a more robust engineering program, Cambridge. As it turned out, acceptance at prestigious Oxford came as a boon because Crozier could sample a variety of engineering subjects. After a couple of years, Crozier realized her passion lay in math. It was this love for the subject that led Crozier to her first research project: using stochastic processes to forecast deaths in the Afghanistan war. The data she worked with covered 2004-2010, part of the Wikileaks release.

The topic sounds random but it was precisely this nature of the project that appealed. “At least in my adult life, I followed the news a lot and I thought maybe this work that spoke to current events was really interesting. Even today, it sparks a lot of conversation,” Crozier says about the work.

The project galvanized a love for research, which Crozier eventually parlayed into doctoral work evaluating the impact of a widespread growth of electric vehicles on power systems. This was 2016, when adoption of EVs was still sporadic and the modeling exercise gathered increasing significance as the years went by. For her PhD at Oxford, Crozier conducted a mix of modeling and optimization techniques to understand how various aspects of the grid would need to change to accommodate EVs.

Understanding that whatever results her research came up with would not go down too well without a view of the policy side of the fence, Crozier worked for the UK government for a year shortly after graduation to understand that side of the equation. Policy details are something she consciously keeps in mind even today.

Move to America

Crozier moved to the United States as a postdoctoral fellow at Professor Kyri Baker’s lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She researched traditional avenues in power to make up for some of the gaps in her resume. Here too she worked on her love of modeling, math, and software, to develop algorithms for grid optimization as part of a competition hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy.

It was also at Boulder, with the Rockies as playground, that Crozier nurtured her love of the outdoors and started rock climbing.

Research at Georgia Tech

After three years at Boulder, looking to get back to interdisciplinary research, Crozier sought out departments where she could work on radically transformative problems using all her skills. She found it in the industrial engineering department at Georgia Tech. She appreciates the diversity of projects at GT, where she can pursue research to address problems without being straitjacketed into specific disciplines.

The decarbonization of power systems that generate and deliver electricity is one of Crozier’s primary areas of interest.

Carbon-based mechanisms for the production and consumption of electricity are fairly straightforward because you can add more fuel as demand increases. But renewable energy equivalents are not as simple because one can’t just add more wind or sun as desired. And as demand on electricity increases with the growth of electric vehicles, these factors will have to be accounted for as grid systems expand.

The process of supply and demand will now change because we can also choose to tweak demand, Crozier explains. For example, we can charge EVs during off-peak hours and even offer incentives to do so. “So maybe we can make our lives easier by not just trying to follow demand curves but try to do something bidirectional,” she says.

While Crozier has been exploring the electrification of transport with EVs, she’s also paying attention to the heavy goods vehicles sector, as it too slowly moves toward electrification. “It also ties in quite nicely to the fact that there’s a lot of people working on supply chains,” Crozier says. She has been able to collaborate with other faculty members who have more experience in the freight industry.

Research is also leading Crozier to explore how artificial intelligence can enable system operators of power grids to make better decisions for grid optimization, work that traces its origins to her area in Boulder.

As for her favorite pastime, research is much like rock-climbing where you work on hard things that are rewarding, she says. “It’s a challenging problem but it feels satisfying even if you take a really long time, there are definitely parallels in terms of the work ethic and mental resolve, where you suffer for a while to achieve results,” Crozier says.

There’s good access to the outdoors (and mountain climbing) in Atlanta too, Crozier points out. The city might not have the Rockies but the Tennessee Mountains are close enough.

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