Mads R. Almassalkhi
Director of the CORE Systems Lab

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CORE Systems Lab

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

Contact Information

Brief Biography

Mads R. Almassalkhi is the L. Richard Fisher Associate Professor at the University of Vermont. His research focuses on engineering flexibility in power and energy systems to enhance resilience and optimize grid utilization, spanning advanced distribution and transmission system operations; modeling, control, and optimization of distributed energy resources (DERs) for grid-aware coordination; and battery energy storage systems. He is the founding Director of UVM’s newest center on energy and autonomy, CREATE. His work has been featured in IEEE Power & Energy Magazine and IEEE Spectrum, and he is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award (2021), the Otto Mønsted Visiting Professorship at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 2022, and recognition as a 2022 Copenhagen Goodwill Ambassador (co-recipient) by Copenhagen Capacity for inspiring constructive dialogue on immigration reform. He also holds a joint appointment at PNNL as Chief Scientist and currently works with NYSERDA as Grid Architect to help design, plan, and realize New York’s vision for a Grid of the Future. Previously, he was a co-founder of Packetized Energy, a clean-tech startup acquired by EnergyHub in 2022, and earlier served as Lead Engineer at Root3 Technologies in Chicago, IL. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering Systems from the University of Michigan in 2013 and a dual B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics from the University of Cincinnati in 2008. When not working on energy riddles or teaching, he enjoys spending time with his wife and their three wonderful children.

Research Interests

At the CORE Systems Lab, we begin every project by asking, “If it works, will it matter?”, and we answer that question by working closely with utilities, grid operators, and industry partners to identify the challenges that matter most in practice. We develop control, optimization, and grid architectures that enable scalable coordination of distributed energy resources (DERs) and realize a responsive grid that adapts to challenges across timescales. Our research follows three themes. First, we coordinate fleets of heterogeneous DERs to provide grid and market services and quantify how much flexibility each fleet can reliably deliver, and our work on DER coordination has produced new technologies, such as packetized energy management (PEM), and new concepts, such as reach-and-hold sets for demand response. Second, to understand the capacity limits of distribution networks, we have developed convex inner approximations of the AC optimal power flow that let utilities convey operating parameters to the parties dispatching DERs. Third, we design layered grid architectures that incorporate the underlying network topology and parameters, for example through optimal Kron-based reductions of the network, to specify who observes, computes, and controls each part of a future grid. We validate our methods on real-time hardware testbeds and in field demonstrations.

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, 2026: Co-founded and co-organized PowerUp 2026, a new power systems conference in Boulder, Colorado, where I also served as Workshop Chair (post).
  • September, 2026: Started two new projects: a Dominion Energy project on optimizing and validating power plant controller parameters with real-time controller-hardware-in-the-loop testing, and the DOE-funded MAPLE ROOT project with VELCO, PNNL, and VEC on real-time dynamic operating envelopes.
  • August, 2026: Congratulations to Dr. Mazen Elsaadany on successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on realizing flexibility for modern power systems (post)!
  • June, 2026: Presented our work at the Power Systems Computation Conference (PSCC) in Limassol, Cyprus, including Omid Mokhtari's paper on optimal Kron-based reduction (Opti-KRON) of three-phase distribution feeders (paper) and Yingrui Zhuang's and Ning Qi's paper on an iterative problem-driven scenario reduction (I-PDSR) framework for stochastic optimization with conditional value-at-risk (paper and presentation).
  • 2026: Congratulations to Omid Mokhtari on the acceptance of our paper on structure-preserving optimal Kron-based reduction (Opti-KRON) of radial distribution networks in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (preprint).
  • Spring, 2026: Enjoyed sharing our work on the physics of virtual power plants at the Champéry Power Conference (February), the Iowa State University Power & Energy Research Center Seminar (March), and New York University (May). In April, I organized the resilience panel at the 2nd Annual Electrify Vermont Summit (post).
  • 2026: Our paper laying out a cross-Atlantic research agenda for scalable grid architectures and distributed flexibility, which grew out of the US-Denmark CANSI research network, is published in Smart Energy (paper).
  • 2026: Joined the Technical Advisory Council at Rivian to advise on bidirectional residential charging.
  • December, 2025: Co-organized and spoke at the Workshop on Advanced Control Strategies for Power Systems in Transition in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on adaptive frequency protection and synthetic damping.
  • 2025: Honored to be appointed Grid Architect (via NYSERDA) supporting the New York Department of Public Service in its Grid of the Future proceedings.
  • 2025: Our invited article on navigating the physics of virtual power plants appeared in IEEE Power & Energy Magazine (article), and I wrote about the evolving IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Energy Systems in IEEE Control Systems Magazine (article).
  • July, 2025: Served on three panels at the IEEE PES General Meeting, on demand response in the DER era, digital twins for battery energy storage, and energy storage market integration. The panel on demand response built on our new definition and research agenda for demand response, published in IEEE Transactions on Energy Markets, Policy and Regulation (paper).
  • January-May, 2025: Presented our work on scalable grid architectures for intelligent electrification at the Grid Science Winter School in Santa Fe (January), as keynote speaker at the NSF Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (March), at the Dartmouth Engineering Jones Seminar (May), and at the EnergyHub Day of DERs (May).
  • December, 2024: Co-organized the second workshop of the US-Denmark Cross-Atlantic Network on System Integration (CANSI) in Boston and an invited session at IEEE CDC 2024 in Milan on incentives, flexibility, and human factors in large-scale DER control.
  • 2024: Began serving as Co-Director of UVM's CREATE center, and two U.S. patents on packetized energy management were issued (Nos. 11,990,750 and 11,972,496).
  • June, 2024: Gave the keynote on scalable grid architectures for intelligent electrification and decarbonization at the IMSI workshop on The Architecture of Green Energy Systems in Chicago, and presented our work at the TotalEnergies Meet the Expert Seminar in Paris-Saclay.
Last updated September 2026.