Mr. Raja Sundararajan is President and Chief Operating Officer for AEP Ohio and is responsible for all aspects of electric service for AEP Ohio’s 1.5 million customers. He leads more than 1,500 employees with a focus on providing electric service, building a smarter energy infrastructure and delivering new technologies and custom energy solutions to customers. Sundararajan has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. He also has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland, a master’s degree in business administration (MBA) from the University of Michigan and he completed the Executive MBA program at the University of Virginia.
Mr. Robert Bradish is vice president of Transmission Planning and Engineering for American Electric Power, the owner/operator of the largest transmission system in the U.S., with 40,000 miles of transmission lines, spanning 13 states and 4 Regional Transmission Organizations. Bradish is responsible for managing activities related to the planning and engineering of the transmission grid, the development of engineering standards, and advanced technical/analytical studies addressing system dynamic analysis, electromagnetic transient analysis, and asset management functions. He is also responsible for managing AEP’s Transmission Technology Research and Development Program. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering from Clarkson University in New York. He also holds a Master of Business Administration degree from The Ohio State University and is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Ohio. Bradish is a member of the Engineering Advisory Council of Clarkson University, the U.S. National Committee of CIGRE, EPRI’s PDU Sector Council, the Industry Leaders Council of the Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions (CERTS) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
Dr. Jianwei (Jay) Liu, Senior Lead Engineer/Project Manager at PJM Interconnection, received his Bachelor (1992) and Master (1997) from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, and his Ph.D. (2004) from University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, all in electrical engineering. He has 25 years experiences in transmission and generation project development, integration and operation. He has successfully developed and integrated more than 20,000 MW conventional and renewable energy resources into power grids globally since 1990’s. He also has 10+ year large scale power system operation experiences on EMS/SCADA core applications, wholesale electricity market analysis, and smart grid applications. Dr. Liu is a senior member of IEEE.
Mr. François Gressier is currently Manager, Energy Program at Engie North America Inc. leading the energy conservation program at the Ohio State University that consists of reducing the energy used on campus by at least 25% for less than $250MM. He is highly driven individual who has successfully developed and led projects in the energy sector. Experienced in district energy systems, power generation, and gas infrastructure. Recent experience encompasses advising on acquisitions and leading the execution of projects in the US and internationally. He holds a Master of Science in Engineering and currently studying for MBA at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Dr. Antonio J. Conejo received the M.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, in 1987, and the Ph.D. degree from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in 1990. He is currently a professor in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. His research interests include control, operations, planning, economics and regulation of electric energy systems, as well as statistics and optimization theory and its applications. Prof. Conejo is a fellow of IEEE and INFORMS.
Mr. Thomas Weaver, Manager of Distribution System Planning at AEP with responsibility for System Planning, Network Planning and Engineering, and Grid Management Deployment. He has been actively involved in developing and applying deployment plans for gridSMART Technologies on the AEP distribution system since 2005. Tom is a Registered Professional Engineer in Kentucky with a BSEE from West Virginia University and a Masters in Business Administration from Morehead State University. Tom is a member of IEEE and is also active with EPRI as a member of the leadership team for Distribution Programs and EEI as Chair of the Planning, Design, and Asset Optimization Working Group.
Dr. Kenneth A. Loparois the Nord Professor of Engineering and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and holds academic appointments in the departments of biomedical engineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering in the Case School of Engineering, Case Western Reserve University. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of AIMBE, and an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems. His research interests include stability and control of nonlinear and stochastic systems with applications to large-scale electricity systems including generation, transmission, and distribution; nonlinear filtering with applications to monitoring, fault detection, diagnosis, prognosis and reconfigurable control; information theory aspects of stochastic and quantized systems with applications to adaptive and dual control and the design of distributed autonomous control systems; the development of advanced signal processing and data analytics for monitoring and tracking of physiological behavior in health and disease.
Dr. Marija Prica received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Power Engineering from the University of Novi Sad in 2000 and 2006, respectively, and Ph.D. degree from Carnegie MellonUniversity, Pittsburgh, PA in 2010. She is an Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. Her interest is in distribution system planning and protection; integration of advanced technologies and control; decision-making for future electricity systems; and optimization of energy storage operation.
Mr. Aaron Bloom is the Director of Product Research and Development at NextEra Analytics and Chair of the Energy Systems Integration Group’s (ESIG) System Planning Working Group. He is an expert in power system planning, power systems operations, electricity market design and utility regulation. Prior to joining NextEra Analytics, Mr. Bloom lead a $20 million research portfolio at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In the Eastern Renewable Generation Integration Study his team showed the potential for integrating large amounts of wind and solar into the Eastern Interconnection. He started his career in the energy sector at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission where we worked on a variety of wholesale market design topics, the implementation of NERC standards after EPACT 2005, and ENRON investigations. Mr. Bloom received his Bachelor of Arts in political science from Michigan State University and a Master of Public Administration from The Ohio State University’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs.
Dr. Mahesh S. Illindala received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, India, in 1995, the M.Sc. (Eng.) degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA, in 2005. Since 2011, he has been a Faculty Member of electrical and computer engineering with The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA. He was a recipient of the 2016 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award. His research interests include microgrids, distributed energy resources, electrical energy conversion and storage, power system applications of multiagent systems, protective relaying, and advanced electric drive transportation systems.
Mr. Kiril Andov received his B.S. degree in Power Systems Engineering from the Sts. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia. Currently he is working as Senior Engineer in System Performance Analysis group at American Electric Power in New Albany, OH where contributed to various large scale projects and published few conference papers related to sub-synchronous control interaction phenomenon. His areas of interest are EMT based large scale power system studies with high penetration of inverter connected generation, simulation of advanced technologies in power systems, design and operation of all inverter based power systems. Kiril received AEP Key Contributor Award in 2014.
Dr. Jianzhe Liu received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 2012, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from The Ohio State University, U.S.A., in 2017. He joined Argonne since January 2018 as a postdoctoral researcher. His research interests include power system optimization and control. In 2019, he received the Argonne Outstanding Postdoctoral Performance award. In 2017, he was nominated as an Outstanding Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.
Dr. Xuan Wu, Chair of the 1st IEEE Workshop on Interconnections of Renewables & Energy Storage to Electric Grids, received the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University, Tempe, in 2013, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University, Columbus, in 2018. He is currently a Senior Engineer at American Electric Power. He has contributed to several AEP substation design standards and published 7 journal and over 15 conference papers in power engineering areas. He received the AEP Key Contributor Award in 2016 and the IEEE PES Columbus Chapter Outstanding Engineer Award in 2017. He is an IEEE member, Chair of IEEE PES Columbus Chapter, and a Professional Engineer registered in Ohio.
