My expected PhD graduation timeline: soon (June 2026)
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.
NREL Graduate PhD Internship
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.
CDC 2024 & HICSS 2025
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!
