Jalal Awan

Jalal Awan (he/him) is a doctoral candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy analyst at RAND. Prior to joining RAND, he worked as an electrical projects engineer with hands-on experience on industrial electrical and control systems.

His research interests broadly fall under technology policy and include autonomous transport, climate change mitigation, community science, advanced manufacturing, infrastructure resilience, and the smart grid. At RAND, he is currently involved in projects under the Social and Economic Well-being division and the Tech and Narrative Lab. Through these projects he is working on novel datasets to disaggregate county-level environmental policy outcomes, prototyping hardware and software solutions for hyper-local air quality assessment, developing performance measures for public health emergency handling, estimating benefits of autonomous vehicles, evaluating transboundary environmental impacts on India-Pakistan relations and using gaming to understand the application of technology in food production. Jalal has also developed technical reports, presented findings to a diverse range of stakeholders (including the Pardee RAND Board of Governors), and volunteered on three panels with the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

As a Fulbright Exchange scholar, he completed his M.S. in green technologies from the University of Southern California in December 2015. Awan is a member of IEEE, Six Sigma Green Belt from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and also holds the U.S. Green Building Council certification in Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED AP).