Tai Stillwater
PhD Transportation Technology & Policy (2010)
Tai Stillwater is a PhD student in Transportation Technology and Policy and third-year Emerging Venture Analyst at the Energy Efficiency Center. He is working as a Graduate Student Researcher under Ken Kurani at the Plug-in Hybrid Demonstration Project, with a focus on vehicle interfaces and energy use. His doctoral proposal is to study the impact of novel vehicle interfaces on driving behavior and fuel economy using the framework of the Theory of Planned Behavior. He was the 2007-8 CH2M Hill Fellow in transportation and received the 2007-8 Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Scholarship. Tai graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2001, and worked on composite parts for the ATLAS particle detector at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) from 2000-2003. While at UC Berkeley, he participated in the Cal Human Powered Vehicle Team, winning the 00-01 racing season with a carbon fiber vehicle he helped design and manufacture, the "Bearacuda". The team broke numerous world speed records, some of which still stand. Recently, the "Bearacuda" was officially accepted into the Davis Bicycle Museum and will be on display after restoration. After leaving Berkeley, Tai spent a year traveling in developing countries and learning about the resource management problems that plague countries around the world. Back in the US, he spent a summer at the California Energy Commission before joining the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. He recently completed his Master's Thesis, which is an investigation of how land-use features impact the adoption of car-sharing. Tai spent the Summer and Fall quarters of 2008 as an intern at Chevron Energy Solutions focusing on renewable energy design for communities. As a part of that Internship, Tai organized the successful December 2008 West Village Contributor's Forum, bringing together the Developer, Architects, Energy providers, and Energy Efficiency Affiliate companies in order to generate a productive dialogue and set the stage for making the Village a low-energy or no-energy development.
