Leadership and Staff

Amit Goyal, Director, UB RENEW Institute Empire Innovation Professor, UB departments of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics and Materials, Design & Innovation. Emeritus Corporate Fellow, UT-Battelle/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Megan joined RENEW in January 2019 as a Senior Staff Assistant. She earned her Bachelor's Degree from Baldwin-Wallace University, her Master's in Music from Juilliard, and her Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Boston University, focusing on performance and pedagogy. 

Susan Spierre Clark is a RENEW Policy, Planning and Sustainability Specialist who focuses on decision-making for improving the sustainability and resilience of critical infrastructure systems to climate change. Her research aligns with the Climate Change and Urban Sustainability focus areas, emphasizing the social processes that are required for designing, operating, and managing resilient infrastructure systems which allow for disaster aversion through adaptive responses. She is also a Research Assistant Professor in the RENEW Institute.

Zia Ahmed is a RENEW Database / Visualization Specialist. He has over 20 years of work experience in environmental modeling and data analysis. Areas of expertise include (1) data mining, (2) geographic information systems (GIS), remote/proximal sensing, and geostatistics (3) linear/non-linear model, mixed effect model, multivariate statistics and machine learning and (4) database management. He is also a Research Associate Professor in the RENEW Institute.

Michael A. Shelly is a RENEW Environmental/Ecological Economist. He is an experienced environmental economist (with over 25 years experience) who has analyzed a wide variety of projects on five continents.  He is also a Research Assistant Professor in the RENEW Institute.

Yi Zhang is a RENEW Electrom Microscopy Specialist. He is an experienced electron microscopist with over 13 years of work experience. His research interests are transmission electron microscopy (TEM) characterization of materials at atomic level, especially multifunctional oxides and superconductor materials. He is also a Research Assistant Professor in the RENEW Institute.