Joan M. Ogden

Joan M. Ogden, professor of Environmental Science and Policy and co-director of the Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways Program, Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis

Over the past 15 years, Joan Ogden has conducted a number of technical and economic assessments of hydrogen and fuel cell systems and studied alternative strategies for developing a hydrogen infrastructure for transportation applications. She and her colleagues have developed an extensive set of data on hydrogen and fuel cell technologies and tools for modeling infrastructure performance and costs.

Ogden was graduated from the University of Illinois with a B.S. in mathematics (1970). She earned her Ph.D. in theoretical plasma physics from the University of Maryland (1977). An interest in broader energy questions led her to Princeton University, where she was a research scientist at the Princeton Environmental Institute’s Center for Energy and Environmental Studies from 1985 to 2003. She participated in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hydrogen Vision and Roadmap process in 2001–2002 and headed the systems integration team for the National Hydrogen Roadmap. Ogden joined the faculty of UC-Davis in 2003 as an associate energy policy analyst and co-director of the Hydrogen Pathways Program at the university’s Institute of Transportation Studies. She is now active in the H2A, a group of hydrogen analysts convened by the Department of Energy to develop a consistent framework for analyzing hydrogen systems.

Ogden has written extensively on energy topics, including a book—Solar Hydrogen: Moving Beyond Fossil Fuels (1989)—several book chapters, and numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and conference presentations.