Section Officers

Chair

Mahdi Pourakbari Kasmaei

Aalto University

Mahdi Pourakbari-Kasmaei (Senior Member, IEEE) received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering, power systems from the São Paulo State University (UNESP), Ilha Solteira, Brazil, in 2015. From 2015 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UNESP and also a visiting researcher at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. He was a project executive or principal investigator of several practical and academic projects and also a consultant in an electric power distribution company.

Currently, he is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Aalto University, Finland, where he used to be a Postdoctoral Researcher since 2017. He is the Chair of the IEEE PES Finland IE13/PE31/34/PEL35 Joint Chapter and Associate Editor of several journals such as IEEE Access, Journal of Control, Automation and Electrical Systems, etc. He was the Ambassador of Clean Energy in IEEE Finland Section 2021 and General Chair of IEEE PES ISGT-Europe 2021 Conference. His research interests include power systems planning, operations, economics, and environmental issues, as well as power system protection and transients.

Vice Chair

Seppo Sierla

Aalto University

Seppo Sierla is docent in the field of “Software Design for Industrial Automation” and University Lecturer at Aalto University department of Electrical Engineering and Automation. He is responsible for teaching the practical branch of the Automation technology bachelor major. He is currently PI of two Business Finland projects related to digitalization of energy and process industry sectors. He is the treasurer/finance co-chair of 6 IEEE conferences in Finland and abroad. He chairs the “Industry digitization, digital twins and industry applications” track of IEEE Conference on Industrial Informatics.

Past Chair

Dimitri Gold

Nokia Bell Labs

Dimitri Gold is a senior standardization specialist at Nokia Standards, Finland. Dimitri graduated from the Physical faculty in 2007 and received his Ph.D. degree (2010) at M.V. Lomonosov Moscow state university. He got his second Ph.D. degree (2012) and the title of adjunct professor in wireless networking technologies (2016) from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The main areas of scientific interest for Dr. Gold are modeling wireless networks, application of ML-based techniques, and innovation in technology.

Secretary

Seppo Borenius

Aalto University

Seppo Borenius is a researcher at Aalto University, School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Communications and Networking. He received the M.Sc (Tech) degree in computer science from Helsinki University of Technology (nowadays Aalto University), Espoo Finland, in 1986. Since 2017 Seppo has been with Aalto University pursuing the Ph.D. degree. His research focuses on the electric energy system management. Prior to joining Aalto University, Seppo made a 35 year industry career in information and communications technology industries and consultancy. During his industry career, he served leading technology companies such as Nokia, Cap Gemini and latest Tellabs/Coriant in various management roles.

Treasurer

Mohammad Jooshaki

GTK

Mohammad Jooshaki received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2014, and the Ph.D. degree in power systems from both Aalto University, Espoo, Finland, and Sharif University of Technology in 2020. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Circular Economy Solutions Unit, GTK, Espoo, Finland. His research interests are power system modeling and optimization, distribution system reliability, performance-based regulations, and machine-learning.

Young Professionals Chair

Sanjay Kumar

Student Representative

Ronal Bejarano

Aalto University

Ronal Bejarano (Student member, IEEE IES and RAS) is currently a doctoral candidate in the Information Technologies in Industrial Automation research group, at the department of Electrical Engineering and Automation in Aalto University, Espoo, Finland since 2020. Also a staff member in the Aalto Factory of the Future laboratory. He received the MSc. degree in automation engineering from Tampere University, Tampere, Finland, in 2019, and the BSc. degree in electrical engineering from the Universidad Distrital Francisco Jose de Caldas, Bogota, Colombia, in 2014. During his transition between BSc and MSc. studies he was an electrical and automation engineer working on commissioning for international projects of Reverse Osmosis water desalination plants. Later during his MSc. studies he participated as research assistant contributing to the H2020 program in projects such as Everysound and Zero Defects Manufacturing Platform. His research interests include remote monitoring and control, industrial informatics, communication technologies in industrial automation, artificial intelligence applications, distributed automation architectures and adaptive manufacturing.

Communications Officer

Stephan Sigg

Aalto University

Stephan Sigg is an Associate Professor at Aalto University in the Department of Communications and Networking. With a background in the design, analysis and optimisation of algorithms for distributed and ubiquitous systems, he focuses on sensing systems for environmental perception and Usable (perception-based) Security. Especially, his work covers proactive computing, distributed adaptive beamforming, context-based secure key generation and device-free passive activity recognition. Stephan is an editorial board member of the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), the Elsevier Journal on Computer Communications and has been a guest editor for the Springer Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Systems Journal. He has served on the organizing and technical committees numerous prestigious conferences including IEEE PerCom, ACM Ubicomp, IEEE ICDCS.

Membership Development

Dick Carrillo Melgarejo

LUT University

Dick Carrillo Melgarejo received the B.Eng. degree (Hons.) in electronics and electrical engineering from San Marcos National University, Lima, Perú, and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Between 2008 and 2010, he contributed to WIMAX (IEEE 802.16m) standardization. From 2010 to 2018, he worked with the design and implementation of cognitive radio networks and projects based on 3GPP technologies. Since 2018 he is a researcher at Lappeenranta–Lahti University of Technology, where he is also pursuing the doctoral degree in electrical engineering. His research interests are mobile technologies beyond 5G, energy harvesting, intelligent meta-surfaces, cell-free mMIMO, and RAN Slicing. Since 2022, he is a Senior Standardization Specialist at Nokia Bell Labs, where he is contributing on shaping the 3GPP release 18 standard (5G-Advanced).