Samar Alqatari is currently a Master’s student at the MIT Computation for Design and Optimization program and a research specialist at the Center of Complex Engineering Systems (CCES) at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since joining CCES, she has been working primarily on the impact of dust and air-quality on solar technologies. She has developed a spatiotemporal optimization model for solar photovoltaics deployment, which takes into account the impact of dust. She has also looked into dust mitigation using different self-cleaning technologies. Her work on dust tied to different projects at the center: the Sustainable Infrastructure Planning System (SIPS), Strategic Solar Desalination Network (SSDN), and recently, the Saudi Desert-Greening project. Additionally, she is part of the Urban Power Demand and Innovation Space project teams. Prior to joining the center, she graduated from Stanford University ’14 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in history. While in college, she pursued her interests in renewable energy through research: first by working as a research assistant at Masdar Institute, characterizing ZnO thin films and studying applications in solid state devices; and then at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Molecular Photovoltaics where she worked on perovskite solar cells. She is interested in physics, energy, complex systems, network science, and the energy-environment-political economy nexus.