Meet Suzanne Singer, an energy and thermal fluids analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and the latest profile in the Energy Department’s #WomenInSTEM video series. Suzanne works in solar forecasting, where she tries to predict how much solar energy a solar farm will produce. She also works to build collaborations between the Energy Department’s National Labs and Native American tribes across the country.
Suzanne’s passion for science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, fields grew out of her parents’ careers. Her mom works as a cartographic technician for the United States Geological Survey and puts together maps of the moon and far-off planets. Suzanne’s dad likes to tinker with computers — taking them apart, fixing them and putting them back together. She credits her parents’ passions for her engineering curiosity.
Currently, Suzanne’s work in solar forecasting requires her to estimate how things like a solar module and cloud formations influence how much energy is being produced. She applies this information to determine if that power is put into a building, how the building can be designed to be more efficient. Ultimately, her goal is to use less electricity from the grid by utilizing what energy there is already in a system.
Suzanne’s work with the Energy Department’s Tribal Energy Program sparked her interest in making Sankey diagrams — charts that diagram how energy sources flow into different energy sectors — for different tribes. For example, a Sankey diagram helped her determine that the southwestern U.S. has a lot of potential for solar energy. With this information, tribes can learn how to effectively drive resources to renewable projects. This is especially important to Suzanne, who is Navajo, as she can directly empower tribal reservations to take responsibility for their own energy generation and usage.
Outside of her work, Suzanne enjoys going to conferences like the Society of American Indian Government Employees because she gets to interact with younger students. Specifically, she gets to interact with younger people and show them that there are “people that look like you” following their passions and succeeding.
Watch the video above to learn more about Suzanne’s #WomenInSTEM story and check out our other #WomenInSTEM videos on YouTube.
