Mentor: Eric Richert, Assistant Professor, Economics
Zoe Springsteen, from Anchorage, Alaska, is a third-year undergraduate at the University of Chicago, pursuing a B.A. in CSG and REES (Russian studies). She has professional experience with Strategy North Group, U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, and ClearView Energy Partners, focusing on energy markets, grid reliability, Arctic policy, and renewable energy. Zoe serves as Director of Partnerships for the Energy Terminal and Co-Director of Professional Development for the UChicago Energy and Climate Club (ECC), in addition to her role as Head of The Economic Weekly Podcast at the Chicago Economics Forum.
In September 2025, Springsteen attended Climate Week NYC with the Institute’s first student delegation.
“”This week was formative for my career path—I learned about new technologies, met energy and climate leaders, and encountered key industry trends. My biggest takeaway: clean energy will dominate not just for environmental good, but because brilliant minds are aligning the engineering, unit economics, and policy to make it the strategically superior choice.”
Previously, as a Summer 2025 Polsky Research Fellow, Springsteen pursued energy market research with Professor Eric Richert. Richert’s current research includes building a market-entry model for data centers, which integrates variables such as dynamic electricity pricing, water rates, weather conditions, and proximity to urban centers—enabling nuanced analysis of cost structures and competitive landscapes for infrastructure investments. Springsteen’s role centered on sorting, cleaning, and optimizing large electricity-market and infrastructure datasets, as well as organizing them into usable formats for analysis. She also reached out to utilities, agencies, and other entities to gather additional data, ensuring completeness and accuracy.
“This internship gave me hands-on experience with the kind of quantitative analysis that underpins decision-making in the climate and energy space. By working with electricity prices, water usage, weather patterns, and other infrastructure data, I learned how to assess the tradeoffs that shape where and how large energy users like data centers are built. The experience also pushed me to join the first cohort of the new Climate and Sustainable Growth major, where I can continue building on these skills while being part of the community early on.”
Zoe was also a finalist in the 2025 Climate Case Competition.
“I love that [my teammates] all have different sets of expertise and they complement each other well. I’m really glad that this case competition exists so that I can work with such cool people on a topic that I love so much.”