Energy engineer leaves prominent US lab for Chinese university
- Zhang Xiangyu is a specialist in intelligent applications to power systems, and has joined Southeast University in Nanjing

Zhang Xiangyu, a specialist in intelligent control of new power systems, has left his job at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado to take up a post at Southeast University in Nanjing, Jiangsu province.
According to the university’s website, Zhang will be a doctoral supervisor and an associate researcher at its electrical engineering school.
Zhang was a postdoctoral research fellow at the laboratory from 2019 before becoming a tenured researcher at the laboratory from 2021 to April 2024.
The lab seeks to advance renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies – areas critical to China’s interests as it ramps up its technology and science drive to boost the country’s economy.
At the lab, Zhang studied the design of deep reinforcement learning algorithms for power systems and how innovative optimisation algorithms could be used in electricity systems, according to the school’s website.
