Team

Tao Yang, PhD, PE, MBA

Tao Yang received his B.S. degree from Tsinghua University in 2005, and his Ph.D. degree in Power System from Washington State University in 2011. Dr. Yang has worked for various leading U.S. utilities and RTOs on extensive power system studies including but not limited to power flow, short-circuit, transient stability, economic, electromagnetic, harmonics, and sub-synchronous resonance. Dr. Yang has more than a decade of industrial experience in transmission planning, operation, protection & control, NERC compliance, EMS applications, and synchrophasor applications. Dr. Yang has also worked on renewable energy resource Interconnection Analysis all over ERCOT, SPP, and PJM footprint focusing on stability and weak grid performance enhancement. He also participates in the NERC renewable energy performance and integration task force such as IRPTF and IEEE/NERC Task Force on Short-Circuit and System Performance Impact of Inverter Based Generation. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in Electrical Engineering in the State of Ohio.

Song Zhang, PhD

Song Zhang received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University. He is a certified AWS Solution Architect and he is leading the cloud adoption effort at ISO New England. Song received CEO Innovation Award in 2019 and 2020 for his contributions in bringing groundbreaking research and development to his company. His domain expertise includes power system operation, power system analysis, power system stability and control, cloud computing, big data and synchrophasor technology. Song is a Senior Member of IEEE. Song is also Chair of IEEE PES Task Force on Cloud Computing for Power Grid and Chair of IEEE PES Springfield Chapter.

Xiaoyong Su, PhD

Xiaoyong Su received his Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007. He has more than 17 years of industrial experience. His domain expertise includes software system architect, security, network technologies, data visualization and analytics, IoT and cloud solutions. He has led the development of Phasor Data Analytics series of products including the Phasor Grid Dynamics Analyzer, Phasor Data Conditioning Application and Phasor Data Mining Application. He has been a key member for the past DOE/CERTS Data Validation Project. He published more than 10 papers on data acquisition, data integration, data integrity for enterprise applications.

Young Zhang

Young Zhang received his master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University. He currently works at Oscar Health as an Engineer Functional Area leader overseeing 3 teams in his functional area. He has been developing large-scale data pipeline and data automation projects in Oscar Health, including the core member engagement engine (Core competency in Oscar Health’s IPO’s RoadShow). Prior to Oscar Health, he was a full-stack software engineer and developed production-grade real-time & offline analytical platforms and applications. He also has a track record of supporting and developing engineers' career growth.

Rui Sun, PhD

Dr. Sun received his Ph.D degree in Power Systems from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 2012. Rui has more than 10 years of industrial experience in Transmission Planning, Operations Engineering, Renewable Energy, Smart Grid and Power System New Technology Implementation from several leading U.S. utilities and used to oversee an engineering team dedicated to Strategic Planning and Special Studies. He has extensive experiences in NERC TPL and MOD studies, dynamic simulations, EMT modeling. black start and system restoration, and geomagnetic disturbances assessment. He serves as a team member in NERC TPL-007 Geomagnetic Disturbances standard drafting team and an observer in NERC MOD-26/027 generation model validation standard modification team. He also participates in NERC Geomagnetic Disturbance Task Force, IEEE Cascading Failure Working Group, and Renewable Energy Working Group.

Cathy Miller, MPA,PMP

Cathy Miller received her Master’s degree in Public Administration from Florida State University in 1993. She started working as a researcher for the state government, building statistical models to project the workers’ compensation insurance premium and conducting program evaluation. For the last 25 years, she has served as a data analyst, project manager, and IT director for the Florida Department of Health (DOH) on a program that provides medical services for low-income children with special health care needs. As IT director, she managed a team that provided hardware support, system development, and data analytics to a program with 900 employees and 86,000 clients. Cathy has managed numerous projects, ranging from information system development, data migration between systems to financial reconciliation with vendors, and other state agencies. She successfully managed the re-coding of the statewide child protection information system in 2007 and the construction of data warehouses for the program in 2018 - 2019.

Michael Yu, MBA, CIA, CIG

Michael Yu received his MBA from the University of South Alabama in 1997, and started his career in the field of auditing, enterprise risk management, and fraud prevention and detection. During the past 24 years, he served as a Financial crime analyst, the leading auditor, audit manager, and chief audit executive in various government agencies. Michael has a proven record of managing complex audit projects, developing enterprise risk assessment and management framework, building an effective audit team, and developing and implementing fraud prevention and detection mechanism. He has 20 years’ experience in conducting performance, compliance, financial, and information technology audits. He is also an expert in enterprise risk management, fraud prevention and detection. Michael is a Certified Internal Auditor (CIA), and a Certified Inspector General (CIG). He has been serving as the Director of Audits in a government agency since 2007.

Ashley Wang, EIT

Ashley Wang received her master's degree in Environmental Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2012. She has a proven track record of managing DOE, NERC, and Utility projects. She has been engaged in the research and development of data analytical applications for data quality, anomaly and event detection, data mining, and NERC compliance studies. Ashley has experience in managing NERC certified courses in grid operations and planning, and design and development of on-demand online courses for operators and engineers at large ISOs and utilities. She also has experience in corporate operations and finance. Ashley Wang is an Engineer-In-Training in Environmental Engineering in the State of Illinois.

ADVISORS

Dr. Anjan Bose

Dr. Bose is a Regents Professor and the Distinguished Professor of Electric Power Engineering at Washington State University, where he also served as the Dean of the College of Engineering & Architecture from 1998 to 2005. In 2012-13 he served as a Senior Advisor to the US Department of Energy on the electric power grid during the Obama Administration. He is a leading researcher on the operation and control of the electric power grid. Dr. Bose is a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Member of both the Indian and the Chinese National Academies of Engineering. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He was the recipient of the Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award, the Third Millenium Medal, and the Herman Halperin Electric Transmission & Distribution Award from the IEEE. He has been recognized by both Iowa State University and the Indian Institute of Technology with their distinguished alumnus awards. He has served on several editorial boards and on many technical committees and conference organizations. He was appointed by the governor to the board of directors of the Washington Technology Center, and by the US Secretary of Energy on the committee to study the 1999 and 2003 power blackouts. He has served on several committees of the US National Academies and serves on its Governing Board. He was a founding member of the Governing Board of the Washington State Academy of Sciences and served as its President. He has consulted for many electric power companies and related government agencies throughout the world.

Dr. Dejan Sobajic

Dr. Dejan Sobajic has over 40 years of experience in areas of power system operations and planning, wholesale markets operations, control-center technology and operator training. Dr. Sobajic presented and published the first reference in the field of application of neural net computing in power engineering (1988 IEEE PES Winter Meeting in New York). Neural-net learning was used to investigate transient system behavior of electric power systems. He developed a seamlessly integrated Unsupervised/Supervised Learning system capable of online and offline information processing and demonstrated its capability to significantly reduce network training requirements. He directed the design, procurement, installation, and testing activities for the NYISO-wide fully operational system of 50+ phasor measurement units with an associated system monitoring capability. He is a founding member of IEEE Task Force on Applications of ANN to Power Systems, and CIGRE Task Force 38.06.06 on Application of ANN to Power Systems. Dr. Sobajic is a Fellow of IEEE.

Dr. Bernard Lesieutre

Dr. Bernard Lesieutre is the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a Senior Fellow of the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also affiliated with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and he teaches and advises students in the Energy Analysis and Policy program. Professor Lesieutre holds a research appointment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.Dr. Lesieutre’s research, teaching, and professional interests involve electric energy systems and energy policy. His research activities involve the development of tools to advance the design of reliable electric power systems and energy policies to support system reliability. He has published numerous reports in support of activities at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and he was a member of a team that helped investigate the August 14th, 2003 Northeast blackout.

Dr. Ethan Xu

Dr. Xu received his PhD and postdoc at Texas A&M University, bachelor’s degree at Tsinghua University, all focusing on clean energy. He is the Research Director, Breakthrough Energy Sciences. He joined Breakthrough Energy as the Chief Scientist and system architect of the energy system modeling project in 2020. He works with a talented and diverse team of research scientists, data scientists, and software engineers to explore potential pathways to 100% clean energy and build open-source software. His research focuses on clean energy technology and energy policy. Dr. Xu has spent the entirety of his academic and industrial career working in clean energy field, starting in 2014 at Intellectual Ventures where he founded the grid modeling project, and led a diverse team of experts to build a high-resolution electric grid model to support large scale clean energy integration. Yixing was awarded with Impact Award in 2019 for his leadership and contribution. Previously, he worked at Alstom Grid to build energy market clearing engines for the energy industry. Yixing has published over 10 papers, book chapters, and technical reports in top journals and conferences, and delivered invited talks.

Kevin Chen, P.E.

Kevin Chen received his master's degree in Power Systems from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and bachelor's degree in Power Systems and Its Automation at North China Electric Power University. He has a proven track record of driving multi-disciplinary teams through a lean, agile-based incubation and implementation process, and managing product development & deployment. He has been engaged in research, design, and implementation on applications of smart grid technology, and utilization of time-series data for grid stability analysis, real-time situational awareness, data mining, asset management, and predictive maintenance. Kevin has worked with large ISOs and utilities on deployment and use of both model-based and data-driven analytical applications for grid reliability and resilience. Kevin served as Principal Investigator and technical advisors for several DOE, WECC funded projects. Kevin Chen is a licensed Professional Engineer in Electrical Engineering in the State of California and a Senior Member of IEEE.