Short reflections and updates on my current work.
I'll be in Montréal this July to attend the PES-GM and have the priviledge of presenting 3 conference papers!
I'm excited to say that I have accepted a position as a Power Grid Engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) to conduct research in the topics of power system analysis, operation, and resilience. This position will be within the Computational Engineering Division (CED) with work supporting LLNL’s Cyber and Infrastructure Resilience (CIR) program. This summer I will be moving down to the Bay Area, after I have defended my dissertation.
Today, I presented my research proposal and graduation timeline to my General Exam Committee. I am grateful to say that I passed my examination and am now officially a PhD Candidate. A huge thank you to my committee: Prof. Baosen Zhang, Prof. Daniel Kirschen, Prof. Jing Yu, and Prof. Chaoyue Zhao.
Going into the fifth year of my PhD studies at the University of Washington, I'm cautiously excited to say the end is in sight. Currently, I am planning on taking my General Exam in December, and potentially defending my dissertation as soon as June of 2026. As I begin the process of wrapping up all of the threads of research that I've weaved over these past few years, I am thinking about how what my next steps will be as a Post Doc. My job hunt has commenced, and I am looking for opportunities to continue researching the control and stability of distributed systems of inverter-based resources.
Over the summer, I had the opportunity to be a PhD intern with the Grid Modernization group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). I had a wonderful time working with Shuan Dong and Jin Tan exploring the most recent developments in grid strength metrics for systems with high levels of inverters and working on developing a new grid strength metric. I also got to play around with writing python scripts for PSS/E and measuring admittance models with frequency scanning methods in PSCAD. We'll soon be submitting some papers to the PES-GM; one gives an overview of what I learned about state-of-the-art grid strength metrics, while the other introduced a method for calculating eigenvalue sensitivities to changes in power flow injections.
Over this past month, I had the privilege of presenting papers at two conferences: the Controls & Decision Conference (CDC) in Milan and the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) on the Big Island.
Both papers focus on the same topic-the control of grid-interfacing inverters while considering current magnitude limits-but approach the problem from different angles. The CDC paper establishes conditions for controller stability when a current limiter is included in the system, while the HICSS paper explores the use of a safety filter to prevent violations of current magnitude limits.
I'm grateful for the opportunity to present these works (provided by my Advisor Baosen Zhang and a Clean Energy Institute travel grant) and for all the meaningful connections I made at these conferences!