Senior Technical Advisor, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Dr. Ron Melton is a Senior Technical Advisor in the Electricity Infrastructure and Buildings Division at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). He is a member of the core team for the DOE Grid Architecture project currently leading the Distribution Transformation and Coordinate Storage Network efforts, and Administrator of the GridWise® Architecture Council. Previously he was the Group Leader of the Distributed Systems Group. He was the original Principal Investigator for the DOE Advanced Grid Research project for an ADMS Open-Source Platform. He was the Project Director of the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration that concluded in June 2015. He has 10 years of experience in cyber security for critical infrastructure systems and over 30 years of experience applying computer technology to a variety of engineering and scientific problems. Dr. Melton is a Senior Life Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is the past chair of the IEEE Power and Energy Society Smart Buildings, Loads, and Customer Systems Technical Committee and co-chair of the Smart Electric Power Alliance Grid Architecture Working Group. Dr. Melton received his BSEE from University of Washington and his MS and PhD in Engineering Science from the California Institute of Technology.
Senior Vice President, OATI
Farrokh Rahimi holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with over 40 years of experience in the electric power industry. In his current role as Senior Vice President, Market Design and Consulting at Open Access Technology International, Inc. (OATI), Dr. Rahimi oversees development of market design and consulting activities, and is also a key contributor to OATI’s Smart Grid and Grid Modernization activities.
Dr. Rahimi is Life Member of IEEE and a member of a number of Smart Grid and Grid Modernization task forces and committees collaborating with IEEE, NERC, NIST, NAESB, WECC, IRC, and GWAC among others.
Senior Research Engineer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Dr. Seemita Pal is the Team Leader for the Architecture Team in the Distributed Systems Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). She completed her Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2016 and 2013 respectively. Some of her research interests include grid cybersecurity, grid architecture, verification and validation, and synchrophasor technologies. She has authored several peer-reviewed publications and technical reports.
Dr. Pal is currently the Secretary of the IEEE ISGT NA conference, and a program committee member of IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) International Leadership Conference (ILC). She was one of the committee members of WIE ILC 2020 and ISGT NA 2020, and chaired the 2019 IEEE WIE International Leadership Summit which was hosted in Richland, WA. She has held the positions of Secretary and Vice Chair of the IEEE WIE Richland Section between 2017 – 2019. She was recognized with the IEEE Member and Geographic Activities (MGA) Achievement Award in 2019. As one of PNNL’s STEM Ambassador Fellows she frequently communicates her work to students and general audiences, and in 2019 she was recognized as PNNL Shining Star. Her profile has been featured in the DOE Women @ Energy : STEM Rising series (https://www.energy.gov/articles/women-energy-dr-seemita-pal ).
Assistant Professor, University of Utah
Dr. Masood Parvania is the Director of Utah Smart Energy Laboratory, and Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Research and Advancement of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the University of Utah. His research interests include the operation, economics and resilience of power and energy systems, and modeling and operation of interdependent critical infrastructures. Dr. Parvania serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, the IEEE Power Engineering Letters, and the IET Renewable Power Generation. He is the Chair of IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Utah Chapter, the Chair of IEEE PES Bulk Power Systems Operation Subcommittee, and the Vice-Chair of IEEE PES Risk, Reliability, and Probability Applications Subcommittee.