Core Faculty
Mads Almassalkhi, Electrical & Biomedical Engineering
Dr. Almassalkhi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont and co-founder of startup company Packetized Energy. His research interests lie at the intersection of power systems, mathematical optimization, and control systems and focuses on developing scalable algorithms that improve responsiveness and resilience of power systems.
Research Spotlight: CORE Systems Lab
In the CORE Systems Lab, our goal is to advance our fundamental understanding of how power and energy systems can actively and reliably respond to changing market and grid conditions and enable a clean energy future. Towards this objective, our group seeks to develop impactful grid-aware control and optimization algorithms that coordinate distributed, networked grid and energy resources. Our group's work, thus, investigates modeling and control of fleets of distributed energy resources (DERs) as virtual energy storage (VES), optimization of DERs in transmission and distribution systems, and real-time validation of algorithms in a practical context.
Luis Duffaut Espinosa, Electrical & Biomedical Engineering
Dr. Espinosa is an Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont. His research interests lie in the intersection of estimation theory, signal processing, control theory and learning technologies with emphasis in approaches that are non-parametric and model-free for applications in power systems, monitoring of environmental systems, quantum control and general modelling of nonlinear systems.
Research Spotlight: AIRLab
The Autonomous and Intelligent systems Research Laboratory (AIRLab) has as its primary objective contributing to the development and deployment of autonomy technologies. Particularly, the laboratory is at the crossroads of the fields of systems and control engineering, signal processing, and estimation. Our team currently works in projects related to planning and formation of autonomous systems, localization and mapping, fault tolerant state estimation, free model learning technologies for navigation in harsh environments, constraint management of autonomous systems, and control of unmanned vehicles such as UAVs, among others.
Paul Hines, Electrical & Biomedical Engineering
Dr. Hines is a Professor and the L. Richard Fisher chair in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Vermont. He is also Co-Founder and CEO of Packetized Energy, a clean energy startup company. The mission of Dr. Hines' group is to understand the complexity of electricity and to use that understanding to make energy systems work better (cleaner, more reliable and less costly) through innovative research.
Research Spotlight: Harnessing Smart Grid Data to Enable Resilient and Efficient Electricity
The objective of this research is to harness Smart Grid data (Big Data) to enable more resilient and efficient electricity. Three research sub-projects contribute to this goal. Project 1 combines a new "Random Chemistry" computational algorithm with complex networks methods to find patterns of vulnerability in power systems, and uses the results to reduce cascading failure blackout risk. Project 2 transforms smart grid data into actionable information about the health of a power grid by looking at statistical properties in data from grid sensors. Projects 1 and 2 seeks to make power grids more resilient to fluctuations from renewable generation or weather events. Project 3 uses crowdsourcing to identify trends affecting residential energy consumption through a web-based energy efficiency social network.
Jeffrey Marshall, Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Marshall is a Professor and Associate Dean of Research in CEMS at the University of Vermont. He performed research in fluid mechanics and particulate flows, with a focus on vortex flows and adhesive particulate flows. His recent projects involve nanoparticle diffusion, biofilm simulation, renewable energy systems, turbulent particle agglomeration, obscurent cloud dynamics, particle transport in gas turbine engines, and cold-regions sensor systems.
Faculty Profile, Faculty Website
Research Spotlight: Soiling of Solar PV Panels
Soiling of solar PV panels accounts for significant energy losses in dusty, dry regions of the Earth. This is a particularly important issue for solar energy supply during extraterrestrial exploration on dusty planets and moons, such as on our moon and on Mars, where dust particles are often electrically charged and difficult to remove from the panels. We are working with NASA to develop electrostatic dust shields, which automatically and touchlessly transport particles off solar panels using electrodes embedded in the panels subject to oscillating electrical charges.
Hamid Ossareh, Electrical & Biomedical Engineering
Dr. Ossareh joined the University of Vermont from Ford Motor Company, where he worked as a Research Engineer on advanced automotive control systems. He is currently investigating optimal constraint-aware control algorithms with applications in power and automotive systems. He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering systems (control theory) from the University of Michigan in 2013 and his B.A. Sc. from the University of Toronto in 2008.
Faculty Profile, Faculty Website
Affiliated Research
Jeff Frolik, Electrical & Biomedical Engineering
Dr. Frolik is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Frolik's research focuses on sensor networks, wireless communications, and distributed control. This work has resulted in over 150 peer-reviewed publications, 8 patents, and has involved over 30 graduate students. The work has been supported by industry and by NSF, DOE, NASA, and DOT.
Faculty Profile, Faculty Website
Safwan Wshah, Computer Science
Dr. Wshah is currently investigating machine learning algorithms to be applied in Energy, Transportation and Healthcare fields. He joined UVM CEMS from PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where he worked as a research scientist in the fields of machine learning/deep learning, computer vision, and image/video processing.
