Taemin Heo is an Assistant Professor at Seoul National University (SNU), jointly appointed in the Department of Civil, Urban and Environmental Engineering and the School of Transdisciplinary Innovations. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from SNU, and his M.S. in Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics and Ph.D. in Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the Computational Visualization Center of the Oden Institute at UT Austin and at the MIT Energy Initiative, and served as an Assistant Professor at Hongik University before joining SNU in 2026.

Energy infrastructure is impacted by, and in turn impacts, climate change. A changing climate is reshaping energy demand and supply while extreme weather threatens the safety of infrastructure, and at the same time the energy sector must drastically cut billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year. Achieving climate adaptation and mitigation together, within the limited time horizon to 2050 and under constrained budgets, requires a fundamental rethinking of how energy infrastructure has been designed and operated. Professor Heo’s research develops computational algorithms and frameworks that optimize this transition. Drawing on macro energy system modeling (MES), capacity expansion modeling (CEM), life cycle assessment (LCA), and techno-economic analysis (TEA), he optimizes the design and operation of energy infrastructure such as offshore wind, long-duration energy storage, and nuclear-based hydrogen production from the perspectives of cost minimization, economic viability, and energy policy, making active use of artificial intelligence and, in particular, scientific machine learning. He serves as a reviewer for numerous international journals and was selected as an Excellent Young Researcher by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) in 2026.