Mikhail Chester joined the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering School as an associate professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment in 2011. He has a joint appointment with the School of Sustainability. Previously, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and guest researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Chester's area of expertise is the energy and environmental assessment of large infrastructure systems. His research has focused on transportation systems and cities, evaluating life-cycle and supply chain effects and their associated human and environmental impacts. Chester's research expands the assessment boundaries of complex systems to understand comprehensive effects of policies and decisions, including infrastructure interdependencies. Ultimately, he is interested in determining the external control and damage costs of these impacts and how internalization of these costs may inform behavioral economics for sustainable policies and decisions. Chester applied these research interests as a consultant for the National Research Council of the National Academies' Hidden Costs of Energy study.
Chester also has research interests in closing energy and material loops for infrastructure systems. He has evaluated the economic and environmental feasibility of deploying a waste-to-ethanol infrastructure, optimized an urban recycling network to reduce costs and decrease environmental impacts, and developed a framework for consistent system boundary selection in biofuel assessment.