I am a machine learning research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL). Currently, I am working on developing scientific foundation models. In the past, I have researched advances in deep generative modeling and reinforcement learning. I am broadly interested in applications of AI to clean energy systems.

At NREL, I apply ML to real-world problems such as building energy management, weather and power forecasting, and discovering novel enzymes. NREL is a DOE national lab that uses AI and supercomputing to help tackle the climate crises, which I believe to be one of the most pressing challenges of our time.

[CV][Google scholar] [Github]

Contact: pemami[at]nrel[dot][gov]

News

  • August 2024 My paper “Plug & Play Directed Evolution of Proteins with Gradient-based Discrete MCMC” received an NREL directorate Postdoctoral Publication award!
  • July 2024 I am serving as a guest editor for the Environmental Data Science <> Climate Change AI special issue. See CFP here
  • October 2023 One paper accepted in the journal Neural Computation
  • Sept 2023 BuildingsBench is accepted at NeurIPS’23!

Recent Papers

SysCaps: Language Interfaces for Simulation Surrogates of Complex Systems

arXiv preprint
Augmenting surrogate models for complex systems with natural language interfaces.

Non-Stationary Policy Learning for Multi-Timescale Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

IEEE CDC'23
Framework for learning non-stationary policies in multi-timescale MARL by leveraging periodicity.

BuildingsBench: A Large-Scale Dataset of 900K Buildings and Benchmark for Short-Term Load Forecasting

NeurIPS D&B 2023
Platform for studying large-scale pretraining + zero-shot generalization/finetuning of building load forecasting models.

Plug & Play Directed Evolution of Proteins with Gradient-based Discrete MCMC

Machine Learning: Science & Technology, 2023
Also presented at NeurIPS’22 Workshop on Machine Learning in Structural Biology

A fast MCMC sampler for discovering variants by mixing and matching unsupervised evolutionary sequence models with supervised models that map sequence to protein function.

See my CV for a complete list including older publications.

Leeuwenberg, E. L. J. "A Perceptual Coding Language for Visual and Auditory Patterns." The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 84, no. 3, 1971, pg. 338.