School of Public Policy alumna Maham Furqan, Ph.D. ‘23, researches how independent energy sources could power rural communities
Maham Furqan
By Colin Bowyer, Communications Manager - May 7, 2025
Born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, Maham Furqan, Ph.D. ‘23, was well aware of the U.S. energy policy before even starting her public policy doctoral program at Oregon State University.
After graduating with both bachelor and master’s degrees in economics from the Lahore College of Women University and Government College University, Furqan began working for the American financial giant Standard & Poors Global (S&P) in Islamabad. At S&P, Furqan was a member of the global energy team analyzing the U.S. energy sector.
“It’s a bit ironic that while living in Pakistan, I was working for an American company studying American energy production,” said Furqan. “But the topics I was working on at Standard & Poors aligned so well with my Ph.D. studies at OSU.”
Furqan moved to Corvallis in early 2020, a less than ideal time given the emerging COVID-19 Pandemic. Living in the sparsely populated International Living Learning Center felt “isolating” to Furqan when it was difficult to make friends from a distance. Though, faculty and advisors from the School of Public Policy helped Furqan adjust to the challenging circumstances of moving to the other side of the globe for her studies during a once in a lifetime pandemic.
“My weekly, socially-distant conversations with Brent Steele, Hilary Boudet, David Bernell, as well as other grad students were a lifeline during that time,” said Furqan. “They all created such a great community within the cohort of Ph.D. students, which not only helped me come out of my shell, but also with my research.
As a Fulbright scholar at OSU, Furqan studied microgrids, a localized, independent electrical grid, and their use to serve communities during and after extreme weather events in an era of climate change. Her dissertation aimed to answer how state-level regulatory frameworks, in this case California and Oregon, around microgrids evolved to incorporate the value of resilience.
“The U.S. energy infrastructure is aging, which is making it more expensive and difficult to maintain,” explained Furqan. “I wanted to explore from a policy perspective if rural communities attempted to establish their own independent microgrids. The implications are particularly relevant with rural communities becoming increasingly cut off from the centralized grid after extreme weather events, like what we saw with the wildfires in Northern California.”
Employing a qualitative analysis of 250 policy documents and over 50 interviews with policy makers found the relative usefulness of microgrids, but a dearth of funding, regulatory capacity, and policy maker interest in supporting these projects.
“Microgrid advocates see resilience in establishing a closed electrical grid by not having to rely on utility companies for consistent energy,” explained Furqan. “But for opponents, it comes down to cost and scalability. Policy makers see it as a cost of repairing an outage versus the cost of avoiding an outage. ‘Why spend millions of dollars for small, more isolate projects for communities that sometimes have less than a thousand people?’”
Furqan’s interest in community resilience came from her own experience at S&P, where she worked with electrical transmission data on aging infrastructure. At S&P Furqan was analyzing why the cost of transmission and distribution of electricity has gone up, despite the decreasing cost of generating power.
“Even though cheaper, more efficient power was being produced by novel renewable sources, the average consumer saw no real reduction in their price per kilowatt/hour. Where was the system failing? I started to think more about how it’s the utility’s responsibility to create a resilient power network, but it was the resilience of the community that mattered when the utility failed.”
After graduating from the School of Public Policy in 2023, Furqan moved back to Lahore to start her own energy consulting firm, Betelgeuse. While running her own business, Furqan is also a visiting fellow at the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies, research affiliate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and consultant for the World Bank.
“The faculty at the School of Public Policy helped me in so many ways beyond academic performance,” said Furqan. “They pushed me and made sure I was putting in the effort to prioritize myself. I wouldn’t be here without them.”