Ross is a Ph.D. student in the MIT Engineering Systems Division. His research concerns investigating the tradeoffs between short-term gain and long-term sustainability in complex decision making contexts. As a research contributor to the Integrated Energy Decision Support System (IEDSS) project, Ross is exploring these tradeoffs in the context of electricity planning in Saudi Arabia using a combined System Dynamics and Agent-Based Modeling approach. More broadly, he is interested in systems analysis of natural resource and energy policy in countries of the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region. Previous work for the MIT-Portugal Program centered on the tradeoffs between fire suppression and prevention to effectively manage forest fires in Portugal.

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Ross holds an S.M. in Technology & Policy from MIT, an M.S. and B.S. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia (UVa) as well as a B.S. in Economics from UVa. Research at UVa included tradeoff exploration of different geographic configurations of PV installations, risk-scoring of critical infrastructures for the Virginia Department of Transportation and the US Department of Homeland Security, and economic analysis of workforce disruptions during pandemic flu outbreaks.