Project at HIAS
Accessible Sustainable and Smart Charging Infrastructure for Electric Vehicles
Sanchari Deb’s HIAS project aims to develop electric vehicle charging infrastructure that is accessible, sustainable, and smart. The rising concerns over global warming, climate change, energy crisis, and pollution have called for the electrification of the transport sector. It is predicted that the oil consumption of the transport sector will rise by 54% until 2035. As a measure to decrease the greenhouse gas contributions of the transport sector, the twenty-first century has witnessed the replacement of conventional internal combustion engine driven vehicles with electric vehicles. However, there are still some unsolved challenges associated with EVs that are worth investigating. One of them is the availability of smart and sustainable charging infrastructure for EVs. Unavailability of easily accessible charging infrastructure is one of the challenges hindering mass deployment of EVs. Cities or urban areas will be the early adopters of EVs and so establishing accessible, smart and sustainable charging infrastructure in the cities is foremost important.
Sanchari Deb’s Tandem Partners are Detlef Schulz, Professor for Electrical Power Systems at the Helmut-Schmidt-University, and Achim Oberg, Professor for Sociology, especially Digital Social Science, at the University of Hamburg.
Website
Sanchari Deb
Funding
The HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Tandem
Prof. Dr.–Ing. habil. Detlef Schulz, Electrical Engineering, Helmut-Schmidt-University
Prof. Dr. Achim Oberg, Sociology, University of Hamburg
Biography
Sanchari Deb completed her PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati on ‘Charging Infrastructure Planning for Electric Vehicles’ in the year 2020. Post PhD, she joined the Alliance for Energy Efficient Economy, New Delhi as consultant and worked on vehicle grid integration in the Indian context. In 2020, she received a fellowship from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) and joined the “Smart eFleet group” of the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland as research scientist. In 2021, she received the MSCA COFUND EUTOPIA COFUND SIF fellowship and joined the “Power and Control Systems Research Laboratory” of the University of Warwick. In 2022, she received a Newcastle University Academic Track (NuAcT) fellowship under the “Cities and Place” theme and joined Newcastle University as academic track fellow. As part of the NuAcT fellowship, her research focuses on accessible smart sustainable charging infrastructure to promote transportation electrification in cities. She is also involved in a lot of equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiatives at Newcastle University and has been awarded the EDI in Energy fellowship in 2023.
Her research interests broadly cover different aspects of power and energy such as e-mobility, charging infrastructure planning, artificial intelligence applications, microgrid planning, local energy systems with cogeneration, vehicle grid integration, optimization, metaheuristics algorithms, tool development for charging station placement, machine learning applications, power system reliability, intelligent transport, autonomous vehicle, quantum computing applications, solar based charging infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs), climate change and circular economy.
Deb’s HIAS fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Image Information
Lectures and Events (excerpt)
3/16/2026, #Workshop: Data, Society, and the Future of E-Mobility: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Just and Resilient Transitions
12/11/2025, #Thursday Colloquium: Rethinking E-Mobility at the crossroads of technology, society, and economy