On your profile on the Stanford website, it says that you work in the field of Mechanical Engineering. However, your research seems rather interdisciplinary. Could you explain your focus?
My Ph.D. research focuses on the integration of electric vehicles (EVs) and the electricity grid. It’s particularly interesting because these have historically been very separate fields. Transportation engineering and electrical engineering were quite separate, and now they are starting to merge because of the rise of EVs. With that, there are a lot of challenges. Grid infrastructure needs to be able to meet the demand from EVs, and there are many other issues as well. One newer technology I focus on is called vehicle-to-grid charging. That’s when electric vehicles can not only charge from the grid, but also discharge energy back to it.
You introduced this topic thoroughly in your lecture at the FEE CTU. What was the key message?
Half of my talk focused on my Ph.D. research at Stanford, and the other half focused on research I did here at CTU in the Center for Energy, Networks & Transportation (CENT CIIRC), looking at EV charging stations owned by Škoda Auto at their manufacturing plant in Mladá Boleslav. We analyzed which of those charging stations could potentially be upgraded to support bidirectional, or vehicle-to-grid, charging. The core issue is that vehicle-to-grid is a promising technology, but it is still unclear how to adopt it, and data-driven approaches can help us understand that in real-world settings.
Could you explain a bit, why would an EV owner want to send electricity back to the grid?
That’s a good question. One big benefit is during a power outage. By discharging energy, the EVs can help support the grid. This can protect your home during a power outage, which maybe doesn’t happen as much here but happens frequently in the United States. Also, if you don’t need to drive anywhere, you might as well use the electricity stored in your car to power your refrigerator or other essentials. The other reason relates to economic incentives. If the grid is strained at a certain time, electricity providers could offer money to EV owners to discharge some energy back to the grid. Then the car could charge again later. In that case, if your car is sitting in the garage anyway, you could earn money from it. Those mechanisms are not really in place yet, but that’s the idea.
But doesn’t sending electricity back and forth involve energy loss?
There is definitely energy loss, so you would only do this if you had either an economic incentive, a real benefit for the grid, or a power outage. The goal is that its value is greater than the energy you lose in the process.
Is this kind of stuff already in place somewhere, or is it still mostly a research problem?
It is happening on a very small scale. There are some locations in Europe where this is starting, and in the United States it’s also beginning very slowly, including with electric school buses as another use case. But we’re still talking about very small numbers of vehicles — in the tens, or fewer than a hundred.
Tell us, how you got into this field in the first place.
Going all the way back, I grew up very close to the ocean in California, with a climate where you can be outside all year. I think that made me interested in the environment and in understanding the world around me. In high school, I was lucky to take what we called technical arts classes — things like wood shop, metal shop, and electronics. I really enjoyed that, together with math and science, and that made engineering feel like a natural path. Then in the last year of my bachelor’s degree, I took a course on power systems, or the electricity grid, which I found particularly interesting. It combined infrastructure, engineering, and the physical systems around us in a way that really clicked for me. That led me into the Ph.D., and then eventually into electric vehicles.
The future of electric mobility: from research to real-world adoption
Electric vehicles are a pretty sensitive political topic. What do you think is one of the biggest misunderstandings around EVs?
This isn’t exactly the focus of my research, but people often ask: if you charge an EV with electricity from coal, how can it really be better for the environment? And then there’s also concern about critical minerals and the materials needed to make the battery. So I think one big misunderstanding is this idea that EVs can’t really be greener because battery production is so resource-intensive. But there’s a whole field called life cycle assessment, where people calculate emissions over the EV’s lifetime. Even though it takes energy and materials to make the battery, EVs still come out greener over the long run.
If EV adoption keeps growing, what should researchers and engineers be working on today to prepare for the future?
There are three things that come to mind. First, grid infrastructure is a huge issue, and I don’t think that will be solved immediately. On the large transmission scale, the question is whether there is enough electricity supply to meet demand. But also, on a smaller scale, the infrastructure around homes and neighborhoods (the distribution grid) was not designed for lots of EVs plugging in. Making sure the grid is ready for large-scale EV adoption is a major challenge. Second, if we imagine a future with lots of EVs, then the electricity powering them also has to become cleaner. So there are big questions about renewable energy, storage, and how to phase out coal or natural gas. In other words: how do you make EVs truly low-emission over the long term? And third, there’s the issue of controlling or aggregating EVs. If you imagine, for example, a fleet of self-driving electric vehicles, or just hundreds of cars and limited charging infrastructure, then the question becomes: how do you coordinate all of that? How do you decide which car charges when? How do you manage charging across a whole system? This is both a planning and control problem.
So this is also becoming a smart systems problem, correct?
Yes, exactly. We talk about “smart grid” and “connected mobility solutions”. EVs are not like gas cars just sitting in the garage. They are connected, they communicate, and there are aggregators that can understand things like state of charge or where a vehicle is going. There’s a much bigger connected system around mobility now, and I think mobility will look very different in the future.
Can this kind of research be done without industrial partners?
You can definitely do theoretical work without them, but I think it’s really important to collaborate with industry. During my Ph.D. I worked with Volkswagen, and here in Prague I’ve been working with Škoda, so it’s a very similar kind of collaboration. It was really enlightening for me to understand what the goals of automakers actually are, because sometimes they were completely different from my research goals. You can do research in a silo, but if you ever want it to connect to practice, you need to understand what industry is trying to do and how your work might fit into that. And I think there is a sweet spot where your work could actually be useful to a company or become part of their plans in the future.
Your field also seems closely tied to policy. Have you ever considered going in that direction?
Not yet, although I think it’s always there as an option. Right now I’m more focused on the technical side. But I do think some of my work can help inform policy, even if someone else is the one doing that next step. That’s kind of my goal: to do research that could later feed into policy discussions.
Inside Stanford’s interdisciplinary culture
Your research is highly interdisciplinary. Has that shaped how you work?
Very much. I think one of the most useful skills I learned during my Ph.D. was communication. I didn’t expect that when I started. I thought I would only research and write papers. But over the past few years, I’ve spent so much time writing and making presentations, and all of them look different depending on the audience. A presentation for an automaker is different from a presentation for a general audience, which is again different from a technical conference talk. The ability to adapt how to explain your work has been really important and much more challenging than I expected. In my field, if you can’t communicate your research to different audiences, then it matters less.
Is there support at Stanford to help researchers get better at this?
Yes! I took a writing communication course for STEM, and that was very helpful. There are also public speaking classes. But beyond formal training, it has helped me to talk to many different people and pay attention to what they find interesting. That helps to understand which parts of your work connect with different audiences.
From your perspective, what is distinctive about Stanford’s culture?
One major thing is the entrepreneurship and startup culture. Stanford has a lot of programs geared toward that. There are classes where you can bring in co-founders or friends and learn how to pitch a startup. There are small venture funds, competitions, hackathons, and all kinds of events run by the school or alumni. Even for people like me, who are not especially focused on startups, there are still benefits. You get to meet very different people. I’ve taken technical courses alongside business students who want to understand the engineering side so they can build companies. Even if I don’t want to join a startup myself, it’s useful to hear how they think and what their goals are. That kind of cross-pollination benefits everyone.
What about the relationship between Ph.D. students and advisors?
I think my experience is very much my own, and relationships with advisors vary a lot at Stanford. My advisor was very connected to industry and always kept that real-world dimension in view. He encouraged me early on to explore lots of different kinds of projects, which made the beginning harder, but in the end gave me a really broad base before I specialized. Over time, the relationship also changed. There was more guidance at the beginning, and later more independence in terms of “you know what you’re doing, come talk to me when you need help.” What I also appreciated was that my advisor really encouraged me to talk to other professors, students, postdocs, or people in industry if they could help answer a question.
Does this connect to a broader interdisciplinary ethos at Stanford?
Yes, definitely. At Stanford, crossing departments is very normal. My degree is in mechanical engineering, but my advisor is affiliated with both civil engineering and electrical engineering. That kind of overlap is normal. I’ve learned it’s important to not stay within one disciplinary bubble but instead make a deliberate effort to find other researchers across departments whose work connects to yours.
What should universities be doing better when it comes to teaching? How can they prepare students for the future shaped by new technologies, including AI?
In my experience, many graduate courses at Stanford are very applied. You take a course on the grid, for example, and then work on a project that feels very connected to the real world. And when it comes to AI, I think students will use it in the workplace, so it makes sense to practice using it in the classroom too. But I also think it’s important to learn the fundamentals of engineering. So the real challenge is how to combine these things. More broadly, I think teaching needs to be student-centered: understanding where students are, what motivates them, what they want to learn, and how to prepare them for the future while still grounding them in core knowledge.
What skills would you recommend students to develop if they want to work in research?
Writing and communication. Sometimes I read papers that contain really good research, but it’s not framed in a way that makes the contribution clear. If the research were communicated differently, it could have much more impact. Networking matters too, but really, being able to explain your research clearly — in writing and orally, to different audiences — makes a huge difference in how that work is received and shared.
Is networking at Stanford institutionally supported, or rather informal?
Both, I think. There are many student-led activities, but they’re very well supported. For example, a student group might get funding from the university, book a room on campus, order food, invite industry people and students, and organize a networking event. The administration staff might not run it directly, but students are given the support and resources to make it happen. There are also many student clubs – sports clubs, identity-based groups, startup groups, climate groups, all sorts of communities. It’s a huge part of the culture.
Are alumni involved in that ecosystem too?
Yes, especially in the startup and business world. More broadly, Stanford has a strong alumni engagement structure. But student groups also build those relationships themselves. For example, one group I’m involved in is creating an alumni mailing list so that current students can stay in touch with former members. That kind of initiative is supported by the university too.
After your visit to Czechia, where do you see the biggest potential for collaboration between CTU and Stanford?
One important area is data collaboration. In this field, data can be hard to come by, so access to real-world datasets is very valuable. Here in Czechia, I was able to work with data from Škoda, and that was helpful to my research. I think there is real potential in collaborations where one institution develops a model and another applies it to a different dataset, or vice versa. Policy is another interesting area. Europe and the US are moving differently when it comes to EVs and vehicle-to-grid technology, and there may be a lot to learn in both directions. In some ways, this technology may develop in Europe sooner, and that creates opportunities for comparison. And then there is also CTU’s location. It’s not just about Prague itself, but about being in a central position for collaboration across Europe, which can be a real advantage.
Author of the interview: Karolína Pštross, Science Communication Coordinator at CTU
Photo: Rod Searcey (Stanford University)
