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The Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS) has named Omar Isaac Asensio, assistant professor in the School of Public Policy, the 2022 recipient of its Emerging Sustainability Scholar Award. The prestigious award, given to one or two early-career researchers each year, “is granted in recognition of a scholar’s existing body of research and in anticipation of future work,” according to the ARCS.

Asensio, director of the Data Science & Policy Lab, focuses his research at the intersection of big data and public policy, particularly how they apply to such topics as energy systems and consumer behavior, smart cities, and machine learning in transportation and electric mobility.

Asensio’s research has been published in several high-profile journals, including a 2020 article on consumer innovation in electric vehicle charging stations published in Nature Sustainability. Most recently, he drove machine learning discovery with a team of public policy students and faculty who published a study on open-access science in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This is truly a wonderful honor,” Asensio said. “I am very grateful for this award, which reflects the growing significance of high-resolution data and field experiments to sustainability research challenges.”

Asensio accepted the Emerging Sustainability Scholar Award at the ARCS’ 14th annual research conference in Milan, Italy. He is the second Georgia Tech scholar to win the award after Basak Kalkanci, associate professor in the Scheller College of Business, did so in 2019.