Qualifications:

BEng, DPhil (Oxon)

Academic Background:

I completed my BEng in Electrical Engineering at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2018. I then completed my DPhil in Engineering Science at Oxford as a Clarendon scholar. Throughout my co-operative undergraduate degree, I worked in power utilities, NGOs, and social enterprises in Canada and Ghana.

Undergraduate Teaching:

Engineering: P2, A2, A4, B2, B14.

I teach engineering courses across all years, depending on what is needed at the time! These include circuit analysis, digital electronics, communication networks, computer vision, signal analysis, project management, and engineering ethics. I have also co-supervised MEng and MSc dissertations alongside Malcolm McCulloch and Stephi Hirmer.

Research Interests:

My research focuses on the design of sustainable and inclusive energy access systems which account for local community needs. I take multi-method and multi-disciplinary approaches combining data-driven spatial analysis and machine learning with nuanced consideration of policy context and stakeholder perspectives to investigate culturally, financially, and environmentally sustainable energy access solutions. Presently, I work on the £38m FCDO-funded "Climate Compatible Growth" (CCG) research programme, which aims to support developing countries in taking a path of low carbon growth whilst simultaneously unlocking profitable investment in green infrastructure. On this project, I focus on subnational energy systems planning and spatial modelling of related economic opportunities in Zambia and Kenya.

Publications:

Leonard, A., Ahsan, A., Charbonnier, F., & Hirmer, S. (2022). 'The Resource Curse in Renewable Energy: A framework for risk assessment.', Energy Strategy Reviews, 41, 100841.

Leonard, A., Wheeler, S., & McCulloch, M. (2022). 'Power to the people: Applying citizen science and computer vision to home mapping for rural energy access.' International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 108, 102748.

Hirmer, S., Leonard, A., Tumwesige, J., & Conforti, C. (2021, April). 'Building representative corpora from illiterate communities: A review of challenges and mitigation strategies for developing countries.' in Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume (pp. 2176-2189).

Hirmer, S., Leonard, A., Conforti, S., & Conforti, C. (2022). 'Perceived value interviews and socio-economic survey data for communities in rural Uganda.' Data in Brief, 40, 107734.

Hirmer, S. A., Mazzone, A., Leonard, A., & Conforti, C. (2022). 'The power of language: Exploring values, empowerment dynamics and communication strategies for gender-inclusive energy service design in rural Uganda.', Energy Research & Social Science, 85, 102379.

Full listing on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=c6zZ6B4AAAAJ&hl=en