Chen credits Kennedy School for giving her new insight into her potential
What happens when utility companies guess wrong when forecasting prices in a newly emerging government regulatory regime? And what can be done to reduce those forecasting errors? Those are two of the questions that Cuicui Chen, Ph.D. ’18, set out to answer when she launched her doctoral research project at Harvard Kennedy School. Chen, who came to HKS after earning an undergraduate degree in engineering at Tsinghua University in her native China and a master’s degree in technology and policy at M.I.T., began asking questions like these as she grew more curious about the intersection of engineering, technology, and policy. She applied to the Ph.D. in Public Policy (PPOL) Program at Harvard, she says, in hopes of delving deeply into these issues. Chen’s dissertation consisted of three separate papers, one of which (referred to as the “job market paper”) focused on the world’s first large-scale cap-and-trade program, the Acid Rain Program, which...