Welcome to the Control and Optimization of Renewable Energy (CORE) Systems Lab at the University of Vermont!

Contact Information (Join us! I am recruiting one talented and motivated student for a fully-funded PhD position for Spring/Fall 2024! For example topics of interest, please see project descriptions: here.)

• Email: malmassa@uvm.edu
• 301b Votey Hall
  33 Colchester Avenue
  Burlington, VT, 05405 USA

Brief Biography

Mads Rønne Almassalkhi is the L. Richard Fisher Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Vermont and is co-founder of clean-tech startup, Packetized Energy, that is commercializing technology related to his research and was recently acquired by EnergyHub. His research interests lie at the intersection of power/energy systems, mathematical optimization, and control systems and focus on developing scalable algorithms that improve responsiveness and resilience of energy and power systems with a recent focus on advanced distribution system operations. He currently serves as Associate Editor at IEEE Transactions on Power Systems and was the previous Chair of the IEEE PES Smart Buildings, Loads, and Customer Systems (SBLC) technical subcommittee on Loads. His work has been highlighted by IEEE Spectrum Magazine in 2022 and recognized with a recent NSF CAREER award in 2021 and the Outstanding Junior Faculty award in his college in 2016. He currently holds a joint appointment as Chief Scientist in PNNL’s Optimization & Control Group and was Otto Mønsted Visiting Professor at DTU Wind & Energy Systems (WES) in Denmark in 2021-22. Prior to joining the University of Vermont, he was Lead Systems Engineer at another startup: Root3 Technologies in Chicago, IL. Before that, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Electrical Engineering (EE): Systems in 2013 and a dual major in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio in 2008. When he is not working on energy problems or teaching, he spends his time with his amazing wife and their three wonderful children.

Research Interests

At the CORE Systems Lab, we are dedicated to improving our fundamental understanding of power and energy systems. Our mission is to ensure these systems can adapt to ever-changing market and grid conditions, paving the way for large-scale renewable energy integration — crucial for combating climate change. We're at the forefront of creating advanced control and optimization algorithms that coordinate and orchestrate distributed energy resources (DERs). Our research delves deep into modeling fleets of DERs as virtual power plants (VPPs) and virtual energy storage (VES). We also study optimization of DERs across transmission and distribution systems and validate our algorithms with testing in real-world scenarios.

Education

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA:

• Ph.D. Electrical Engineering: Systems (2013)
• M.S.E. Electrical Engineering: Systems (2010)

University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA:

• B.S. in Electrical Engineering with dual major in Applied Mathematics (2008)

Recent News

• September, 2023: So glad to see our new paper with Soumya Kundu out that comments on the role of intelligent electrification in enabling renewable generation: Springer link
• September, 2023: Welcome to newly minted Dr. Dakota Hamilton, who joins us from Purdue University as a Post-doctoral Associate on our new Energyshed project!
• August, 2023: Welcome to all the new Ph.D. student in power/energy at UVM! Looking forward to work closely with Eric, Beyzanur, Omid, and Arash.
• August, 2023: Honored to present our group's work to the Power Systems Laboratory (PSL) at ETH Zürich: (talk info and slides).
• July, 2023: Paper accepted! Congrats to Mazen for having our IEEE CDC paper accepted on battery optimization and analysis. See you in Singapore!
• June, 2023: Kicked off a new DOE SETO Hybrid Energy Systems (HES) project that seeks to co-optimize electro-thermal performance of hybrid solar PV, battery, and electrolyzer systems in northern climates.
• May, 2023: Honored to be invited to speak to students at Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) about The Battle for Grid Flexibility: control architectures, information gaps, and grid optimization (talk info and slides).
• May, 2023: Kicked off a new DOE SETO EnergyShed program.
• April, 2023: Honored to be invited to speak to students at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) about innovation and entrepreneurship in the energy space: innovative entrepreneurial electrical engineering (iE3): academia and startups (slides).
• May, 2023: Honored to be invited to speak to students at the famous Michigan Control Seminar to my alma mater about Enabling a responsive grid with distributed load control and optimization (talk info and slides).
• March, 2023: Welcome to newly minted Dr. Tanmay Mishra, who joins us from IISc Bangalore as a Post-doctoral Associate on our new hybrid energy systems project.
• March, 2023: Represented our new Gund Catalyst project new Gund Catalyst project at the annual Gund Research Slam 2023.
• March, 2023: Had a blast sharing our group's work with colleagues at my organized IEEE CISS invited session on Optimization & Control of Network & Distributed Energy Resources.
• January, 2023: Honored to present my first (remote) keynote at International Conference on Sustainable Technology and Advanced Computing in Electrical Engineering (ICSTATE and slides).
• January, 2023: Welcome to CORE Systems Lab, Emily and Kendall!
• January, 2023: New office: I am now in Votey Hall 301b! Come say hi!
• December, 2022: Excited to present Sam's and my work on optimal Kron-based reduction of networks or Opti-KRON in Cancun, Mexico, at (CDC 2022 and slides).