Alfonso Valdes

Alfonso Valdes
Principal Research Scientist
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Alfonso Valdes is the Managing Director of Smart Grid Technologies at the University of Illinois. In that capacity, he is responsible for a portfolio of diverse research activities, including the Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium (CREDC) as well as joint projects in energy resiliency with industry and utility partners. In this role he is responsible for strategic direction of the various smart grid initiatives at the university, including interaction with utility and industry stakeholders. His research interest focuses on security and resiliency of infrastructure systems, particularly innovative techniques for intrusion detection, as well as security implications of renewable energy integration and smart grid demand response mechanisms. Mr. Valdes is the Illinois lead on an industry-academic partnership studying security in time-critical distributed substation protection systems. Mr. Valdes regularly participates in infrastructure security roadmapping efforts at the invitation of DOE, DHS, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Mr. Valdes is active in international collaborations, with KTH (Swedish Royal Institute of Technology) through the University of Illinois INSPIRE program, NWO (Netherlands equivalent of the NSF), and the European Union (external advisor to the CRISALIS project securing critical infrastructures).

Mr. Valdes was formerly a Senior Computer Scientist in the Computer Sciences Laboratory at SRI International, where he led several projects in information security for clients such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. He is co-inventor on two patents in cyber-security.

Mr. Valdes holds an AB (Mathematics) from the University of California, Berkeley and and MS (Operations Research) from Stanford University.