PMAPS 2026 Salt Lake City, UT

Dr. Nat Horner is the Director for Grid Cybersecurity and Communications in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity (OE), where he oversees research and development on securing the information and decision systems to enable a modern, dynamic, digitized grid. In addition, he coordinates OE’s artificial intelligence and data center portfolios.

Over a career spanning the energy and national security domains, Dr. Horner has held roles in systems analysis, policy analysis, program management, and software engineering at the Pentagon, DOE, the RAND Corporation, and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He started his civil service career as a Presidential Management Fellow and completed the Cyber Leadership Development Program at National Defense University as a member of its inaugural cohort. He holds a PhD in engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University and master's degrees in systems engineering and computer science from the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins.

Mark G. Lauby is NERC Fellow and Chief Engineer at NERC. Mr. Lauby joined NERC in January 2007 and has held several positions, including senior vice president of Engineering and Standards, vice president and director of Standards and vice president and director of Reliability Assessments and Performance Analysis. Prior to joining NERC, Mr. Lauby worked for the Electric Power Research Institute for 20 years and began his industry career in 1979 at the Mid-Continent Area Power Pool in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In 2012, Mr. Lauby was elected to the North American Energy Standards Board and was appointed to the Department of Energy’s Electric Advisory Committee by the Secretary of Energy in 2014. Mr. Lauby has served as chair and is a life member of the International Electricity Research Exchange and served as chair of a number of IEEE working groups. From 1999 to 2007, Mr. Lauby was an appointed member of the Board of Excellent Energy International Co., LTD, an energy service company based in Thailand. He has been recognized for his technical achievements in many technical associations, including the 1992 IEEE Walter Fee Young Engineer of the Year Award. He was named a Fellow by IEEE in November 2011 for “leadership in the development and application of techniques for bulk power system reliability.” In 2014, Mr. Lauby was awarded the IEEE Power and Energy Society’s Roy Billinton Power System Reliability Award. In 2020, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) elected Mr. Lauby as a member, citing his development and application of techniques for electric grid reliability analysis. He is also a member of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Executive Advisory Committee, focused on providing strategic support to the PES Board of Directors.

Mr. Lauby is the author of more than 150 technical papers on power system reliability, expert systems, transmission system planning, and power system numerical analysis techniques. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. In addition, Mr. Lauby attended the London Business School Accelerated Development Program as well as the Executive Leadership Program at Harvard Business School.

Franklin Jackson is a Managing Energy Industry Analyst with 15 years of experience at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) providing expertise in generator interconnection, transmission planning, distributed energy resources, and electric storage. Franklin was a primary author of FERC’s Order No. 2023 and has played key roles in other major Commission rulemakings, including Order Nos. 1000, 845, 841, 2222. In addition to extensive rulemaking leadership, Franklin has spearheaded critical compliance efforts, including his roles of co-lead coordinator for Order No. 2023 and western coordinator for Order No. 845, in which he developed training and analysis frameworks, and provided technical support to Commission staff. Early in his FERC career, Franklin led the processing of the western interregional Order No. 1000 compliance filing. In his previous role at FERC as a subject matter expert, Franklin contributed to every western interconnection reform submitted to FERC since 2019, providing foundational analysis, coaching or leading multi- disciplinary teams, and informing Commission decision making. Franklin holds an MBA from the University of Maryland and a BBA in Information Technology from Howard University.

Vic has over thirty years of experience in the electric utility industry and currently serves as Director of Reliability Assessments and Modeling at the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC). Before joining WECC in early 2020, Vic served in engineering management roles at Peak Reliability, the former Reliability Coordinator for the Western Interconnection. Vic was instrumental in developing Peak’s operations policies, methodologies, and procedures aimed at improving reliability in the Western Interconnection for the operations horizon. Prior to joining Peak in 2011, Vic worked in various operations engineering roles at Duke Energy Carolinas and PECO Energy. Vic holds a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from New Mexico State University’s Electric Utility Management Program and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University. Vic is a registered Professional Engineer in North Carolina.

Neil Millar, Vice President of Transmission Planning & Infrastructure Development at the California ISO, leads the division responsible for its transmission planning, infrastructure contracts, and generation interconnection processes.

Prior to joining the California ISO in November of 2010, he was with Alberta’s Utilities Consumer Advocate, the Alberta Electric System Operator, and TransAlta Utilities, then a vertically-integrated utility.

Mr. Millar earned his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering degree at the University of Saskatchewan and is a Professional Engineer registered in Alberta, Canada.

Ms. Edmonds has served as President and CEO of WPP since 2022. WPP is a nonprofit corporation that helps coordinate electric grid operations and grid planning for the western United States and Canada. The WPP supports the activities of the Northwest Power Pool, which includes major utilities, generators, and energy managers who together work for increased grid efficiency and reliability, including WPP’s administration of the regional resource adequacy program (WRAP), which seeks to enhance and increase reliability for entities across the footprint, and facilitation of the Western Transmission Expansion Coalition (WestTEC), a west-wide transmission planning initiative.

Ryan Anthon is the Director of Grid Modernization for PacifiCorp, where he leads initiatives focused on leveraging advanced grid analytics and emerging technologies to improve electric system reliability, resilience, and operational performance. In this role, he oversees the application of data-driven solutions derived from advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), distributed sensor networks, and protective relay systems to support utility planning, operations, and grid modernization strategies.

Ryan holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and is a licensed Professional Engineer (P.E.) in the State of Utah. His utility career spans a broad range of technical disciplines, including metering, distribution planning, system protection, and grid analytics. He has extensive experience transforming operational and field data into actionable insights that improve situational awareness, asset performance, outage response, and long-term investment planning.

Dr. Brian J. Pierre is a senior R&D leader at Sandia National Laboratories, where he serves as Manager of the Power Systems Research Department within the Electric Grid Security Program. In this role, he leads high-impact teams of scientists and engineers. Simultaneously, Dr. Pierre directs flagship Sandia programs overseeing a multidisciplinary portfolio, tying back to the U.S. Department of Energy—the Advanced Grid Modeling Program, the Wildfire Electric Grid Security Program, the Natural Hazards Security Program, and the Transmission Reliability and Operations Program. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in electrical engineering from Arizona State University, focused on electric power systems.

Edna Soraya Rawlings is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. Her research centers on developing mathematical models and implementing advanced optimization techniques to improve the operation and design of complex systems, including electrical grids, energy production systems, and separation processes. She received her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico, and participated in research and academic studies as a visiting research scholar at Carnegie Mellon University.

Elizabeth Glista is an early-career research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Her research focuses on solving hard optimization problems with real-world applications to power system planning, operation, and resilience, including large-scale stochastic planning problems. She holds a PhD and an MS in Mechanical Engineering (Controls) from UC Berkeley (2023, 2018) and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2017).

Tomas Valencia Zuluaga is a postdoctoral researcher with expertise at the intersection of energy systems and optimization, including electricity markets and power system planning problems. He currently develops optimization models and algorithms for power grid expansion planning, including its software implementation in high-performance computing platforms. He completed his PhD in Operations Research at UC Berkeley in 2024.

Bernard is an Operations Research Engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His work focuses on the development of meta-algorithms for challenging optimization problems arising in energy systems, particularly in power grid planning and scheduling. Bernard holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of Tennessee and an MS in Mathematics from Miami University. He is a co-author of several open-source software packages, including Egret and mpi-sppy.

Ian Dobson was educated at Cambridge University, England and Cornell University USA. He previously worked in British industry and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ian is now Sandbulte professor of engineering at Iowa State University and an IEEE Life Fellow. Ian has worked on blackout mechanisms for many years and is currently interested in finding new ways to model and quantify resilience from utility data.

With over a decade of experience in power systems and smart grid innovation, Dr. Shikhar Pandey has held senior leadership roles at Commonwealth Edison, where he led distributed energy resource planning, storm performance analytics, and regulatory strategy. He holds a Ph.D. in Power Systems and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He currently serves as Chair of the lEEE Task Forces on Distribution Resiliency and Grid Flexibility, and as the Technology Lead for the IEEE Industrial Technical Support Leadership Committee (ITSLC).

Allen G. Moore is a research and development intern at Sandia National Laboratories. His work applies machine learning, statistics, and software engineering techniques to analyze energy generation and the grid. He received his Bachelor's in Physics and his Master's in Computational Data Analytics from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Jim Follum is a power systems research engineer at the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He joined PNNL in 2014 after completing his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering at the University of Wyoming. His research focuses on the application of statistical signal processing methods to synchronized power system measurements. He is the technical lead for the DOE/EPRI Novel Applications for Synchronized Power Instrumentation (NASPI) working group and a co-chair of the IEEE PES Forced Oscillations Task Force.

Mani V. Venkatasubramanian is a Boeing Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering at Washington State University and serves as the Director of the Energy Systems Innovation Center at WSU. He received his M.S. and D.Sc. in Systems Science and Mathematics from Washington University, St. Louis, MO, and his B.E. (Honours) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India.  He is an IEEE Fellow and recipient of the IEEE PES Prabha Kundur Power System Dynamics and Control Award.

Dr. Farrokh Aminifar is Principal Advisor and Lead at Danovo Energy Solutions (formerly doing business as Quanta Technology), USA, and an IEEE Senior Member. His expertise spans synchronized measurement technologies, wide-area monitoring, protection and control, cloud-based power system applications, and AI-driven grid analytics. He has led numerous utility projects involving PMU deployment, sensor-to-cloud architectures, and advanced grid monitoring solutions for utilities across North America, Europe, and Latin America. Dr. Aminifar serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Power Systems and IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery and has authored more than 200 technical publications.

SLAVEN KINCIC (SM, IEEE) received a B.Eng. degree from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), Zagreb, Croatia, in 1996, and the M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from École de technologie supérieure, Montreal, Canada, in 2000 and 2006, respectively. He was a Researcher and a Lecturer with École de technologie supérieure. He is currently with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), as a Power System Research Engineer. His previous work experience includes Peak Reliability (former WECC Reliability Coordinator office), Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) and Idaho Power Company. His research interests include real-time operation, power system planning, transient stability, power electronics, power systems, electrical machines and drives, power system modeling, and state estimation.

Mr. Saad Malik is the Manager of Transmission Assessments at NERC. Mr. Malik has over 25 years of experience in the electric power industry, previously serving in roles such as Director of Reliability Assessments at WECC and Director of Engineering at Peak Reliability. Mr. Malik has built an accomplished career in electrical power system design, operations, and transmission planning. Most recently, he led the completion of the US Congress-mandated Interregional Transfer Capability Study (ITCS). He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering, Peshawar, Pakistan, a master’s degree in Electronic Systems Engineering from the University of Regina, Canada, and an MBA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA.

S. Wang has over 30 years of experience in transmission system planning, design, modeling, and compliance, and currently holds the position of Sr. Principal Engineer at Portland General Electric, USA. As a transmission planning expert, he provides consultation and recommendations to senior management. He is an Adjunct Faculty member at Portland State University, where he teaches the Power System Stability courses. He has served as Chair of the US Western Electricity Coordinating Council’s Modeling and Validation Subcommittee since 2016. He leads the review, recommendation, development, and validation of power system models to support reliability assessments and advance the industry. In the past, he has been a technical point of contact for multiple US Department of Energy projects. He is the Principal Investigator of a US DOE Grid Services Demonstration project.

Dr. Konstantinos Oikonomou is a Senior Electrical Engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). His research focuses on power system operations, resilience, and optimization, with particular emphasis on energy–water interdependencies, hydropower and energy storage modeling, electricity market design, and decarbonized power system planning. At PNNL, he has led multiple U.S. Department of Energy–funded projects, including national-scale production cost modeling, energy resilience analysis, and transmission planning studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Utah.

Sohom Datta is a senior power systems research engineer and Advanced Computing Team Lead at PNNL, with over a decade of experience in modeling, simulation, and data analytics for large-scale power and energy systems. He serves as Principal Investigator for multiple DOE HydroWires initiatives focused on quantifying grid resilience under extreme weather events, and has led projects developing adaptive under-frequency load shedding for Vermont utilities in collaboration with ISO New England, as well as frameworks assessing hydropower's role during wildfire-induced islanding. Prior to PNNL, Datta worked at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), where he designed data validation pipelines and conducted forensic analysis of energy market outcomes. He also brings industry experience as a Power System Planning Consultant with Siemens PTI, where he developed steady-state and dynamic models for NERC MOD 25/26/27 validation and transmission risk assessment for wind and solar projects across ERCOT and ISO New England. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering (Power Systems) from Arizona State University, where his NSF- and PSERC-funded research developed risk-based security assessment methods for grids with high renewable penetration. Datta regularly participates in and contributes to IEEE task forces and working groups, including the IEEE Water Power Systems Task Force and the IEEE PES Task Force on Wildfire Aware-Risk Management (WARM) for the Electric Power Grid, as well as the WECC Model Validation Subcommittee, and is a Senior Member of IEEE and a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.

Shuchismita Biswas is a power systems engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where she leads the Sensing and Measurements team. She has a PhD in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech. Her research interests include developing data-driven methods to understand power system dynamics and enhance grid reliability.