2020 Annual Meeting
speakers
Keynote
Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall
Former Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Energy; Distinguished Professor of the Practice, Georgia Institute of Technology; Senior Fellow, Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School
Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall is a Distinguished Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with a joint appointment at its Strategic Energy Institute and the Nunn School of International Affairs. She is also a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Sherwood-Randall served from 2014 to 2017 as Deputy Secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). In her capacity as deputy secretary, she was the Department’s chief operating officer, overseeing a budget of nearly $30 billion and a workforce of more than 113,000 people. She provided strategic direction for DOE’s broad missions in nuclear deterrence and proliferation prevention, science and energy, environmental management, emergency response, and grid security. While at DOE, she developed and implemented a new approach to fulfilling the agency’s growing responsibilities for grid resilience and emergency response to meet growing natural, physical, and cyber threats. She also led energy, climate, and nuclear security dialogues with global partners including China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
From 2013 to 2014 Sherwood-Randall was the White House Coordinator for Defense Policy, Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Arms Control, with responsibility for U.S. defense strategy, policy, and budget planning. She served from 2009 to 2013 as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council where she spearheaded the revitalization of America’s alliances and partnerships in Europe.
In the Clinton administration, Sherwood-Randall served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia from 1994 to 1996. During that time she led the effort to denuclearize three former Soviet states, for which she was awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service and the Nunn-Lugar Trailblazer Award. She began her career working for Senator Joe Biden as his chief advisor on foreign and defense policy. She has also worked atStanford University, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Brookings Institution.
Sherwood-Randall attended college at Harvard University and then earned a doctoral degree as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. She is married to Dr. Jeffrey B. Randall, a neurosurgeon, and they are the parents of two sons, one of whom is a senior majoring in neuroscience at Princeton.
Anuradha Annaswamy
Founder and Director of the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT
Dr. Anuradha Annaswamy is Founder and Director of the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Her research interests span adaptive control theory and its applications to aerospace, automotive, and propulsion systems as well as cyber physical systems such as Smart Grids, Smart Cities, and Smart Infrastructures. Her current research team of 15 students and post-docs is supported at present by the US Air-Force Research Laboratory, US Department of Energy, Boeing, Ford-MIT Alliance, and NSF. She has received best paper awards (Axelby; CSM), Distinguished Member and Distinguished Lecturer awards from the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) and a Presidential Young Investigator award from NSF. She is the author of a graduate textbook on adaptive control, co-editor of two vision documents on smart grids as well as two editions of the Impact of Control Technology report, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on modernizing the US Electric System. She is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC. She is currently serving as the President of CSS.
Ben Fowke
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Xcel Energy
Ben Fowke is Chairman and CEO of Xcel Energy, one of the largest public utilities in the country. The Fortune 500 company, headquartered in Minneapolis, serves parts of eight states, providing electricity to 3.6 million customers and natural gas service to 2 million customers.
Widely respected in the industry, Fowke serves as Chair of the Edison Electric Institute and sits on the boards of the Nuclear Energy Institute, Energy Insurance Mutual and Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. He is also a frequent contributor to important policy topics in Washington, D.C.
Fowke serves on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC), representing the energy industry. The NIAC is a private-public partnership that advises governmental agencies on how to mitigate risk and ensure the integrity of the country’s critical infrastructure.
In recent years, Fowke testified before three Senate committees, providing his expertise on the industry’s cyber security preparedness, on Xcel Energy’s industry-leading Unmanned Aircraft System program and the importance and limitations of battery storage solutions.
Fowke has also testified before Congress about the importance of hiring military veterans in the private sector following their service to our country. Xcel Energy has executed on aggressive hiring goals, ensuring that 10 percent of our new outside hires are military veterans. Fowke was honored with the Responsible CEO of the Year award from Corporate Responsibility magazine for Xcel Energy’s efforts to recruit and retain military veterans.
Fowke serves on the board of directors for Securian Financial. He is also active on several industry and community boards, including the Minnesota Business Partnership which he chairs, and served as co-chair of the 2017 Greater Twin Cities United Way campaign with his wife, Kathleen. He and chosen as the 2018 Executive of the Year by Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal and the recipient of the 2018 Distinguished Citizen Award from the Northern Star Council of the Boy Scouts of America.
Andrea J. Goldsmith
Dean, School of Engineering and Applied Science; Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
Andrea J. Goldsmith is the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science and the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. She was previously the Stephen Harris Professor of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where she is now Harris Professor Emerita.
Her research interests are in information theory, communication theory, and signal processing, and their application to wireless communications, interconnected systems, and neuroscience. She founded and served as Chief Technical Officer of Plume WiFi (formerly Accelera, Inc.) and of Quantenna (QTNA), Inc., and she currently serves on the Board of Directors for Medtronic (MDT) and Crown Castle Inc. (CCI). She is also the founding Chair of the IEEE Board of Directors Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Ethics, and chairs several committees in the NAE. Dr. Goldsmith is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the IEEE and of Stanford, and has received several awards for her work, including the Marconi Prize, the IEEE Sumner Technical Field Award, and the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s Women of Influence Award. She is author of the book “Wireless Communications” and co-author of the books “MIMO Wireless Communications” and “Principles of Cognitive Radio,” all published by Cambridge University Press, as well as an inventor on 29 patents. She received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley.
Ralph Izzo
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, PSEG
Ralph Izzo was elected chairman and chief executive officer of Public Service Enterprise Group Incorporated (PSEG) in April 2007. He was named the company’s president and chief operating officer and a member of the board of directors of PSEG in October 2006. Previously, Mr. Izzo was president and chief operating officer of Public Service Electric and Gas Company (PSE&G). He joined PSEG in 1992.
Mr. Izzo is a well-known leader within the utility industry, as well as the public policy arena. He is frequently asked to testify before Congress and speak to organizations on matters pertaining to national energy policy.
Mr. Izzo’s career began as a research scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, performing numerical simulations of fusion energy experiments. He has published or presented more than 35 papers on magnetohydrodynamic modeling. Mr. Izzo received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in mechanical engineering and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in applied physics from Columbia University. He also received a Master of Business Administration degree, with a concentration in finance, from the Rutgers Graduate School of Management.
Mr. Izzo is the chair of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) and a member of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. In addition, he is on the board of directors for the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), Nuclear Electric Insurance Limited (NEIL), the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
Jesse Jenkins
Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University
Jesse Jenkins is an assistant professor at Princeton University with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment. He is also an affiliated faculty with the Center for Policy Research in Energy and Environment at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and an associated faculty at the Princeton Environmental Institute. Jesse is a macro-scale energy systems engineer with a focus on the rapidly evolving electricity sector, including the transition to zero-carbon resources, the proliferation of distributed energy resources, and the role of electricity in economy-wide decarbonization. He leads the Princeton ZERO Lab – the Zero carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization Laboratory — which conducts research to improve decision-making to accelerate rapid, affordable, and effective transitions to net-zero carbon energy systems.
Jesse completed a PhD in Engineering Systems (’18) and MS in Technology and Policy (’14) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BS in Computer and Information Science (’06) at the University of Oregon. He worked previously as a postdoctoral Environmental Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard University Center for the Environment, a researcher at the MIT Energy Initiative, a research fellow at Argonne National Laboratory, the Director of Energy and Climate Policy at the Breakthrough Institute, and a Policy and Research Associate at Renewable Northwest.
Jesse has published peer-reviewed papers in the journals Joule, The Energy Journal, Economics of Energy and Environmental Policy, Applied Energy, Nuclear Technology, Energy Policy, and WIREs: Climate Change. His work has been supported by competitive fellowships from the National Science Foundation, MIT Energy Initiative, Martin Family Society for Fellows in Sustainability, and Harvard University Center for the Environment. Jesse has given seminars to executives at global electric utility and energy technology companies, presented his work to staff and commissioners of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and state-level regulators and policy makers across the country. He is also a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine “Committee on Accelerating Decarbonization in the UnitedStates: Technology, Policy, and Societal Dimensions,” and he has delivered invited testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the United States House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. His research is regularly featured in media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and National Public Radio.
Prateek Mittal
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
Prateek Mittal is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. His research aims to design secure and privacy-preserving systems. A unifying theme in his work is to manipulate and exploit structural properties of information and networked systems to solve security and privacy challenges facing our society. His research has applied this distinct approach to widely-used operational systems, and has used the resulting insights to influence system design and operation, including that of the Tor network and the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority, directly impacting hundreds of millions of users.
He is the recipient of faculty research awards from Intel, IBM, Google, Cisco, Facebook, Siemens, Qualcomm, the NSF CAREER award (2016), the ONR YIP award (2018), the ARO YIP award (2018), Princeton University’s E. Lawrence Keyes, Jr. award for outstanding research and teaching (2017), and Princeton innovation award (2015, 2017, 2018). He has received several outstanding paper awards, including at ACM CCS, and has been named on the Princeton Engineering Commendation List for Outstanding Teaching five times. His work on securing Internet domain validation was awarded the runnerup for the 2020 Casper Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. He has served on the editorial board of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), the steering committee of the USENIX Security and AI Networking Conference (ScAINet), and has co-chaired the workshops on Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETS) and Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI).
David Nicol
Director of the Information Trust Institute and Herman M. Dieckamp Endowed Chair in Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Prof David M. Nicol is the Herman M. Dieckamp Endowed Chair of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign, and a member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also serves as the Director of the Information Trust Institute (iti.illinois.edu), and the Director of the Advanced Digital Sciences Center (Singapore). He is PI for two national centers for infrastructure resilience: the DHS‐funded Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (ciri.illinois.edu), and the DoE funded Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium (cred‐c.org); he is also PI for the Boeing Trusted Software Center, and co-PI for the NSA‐funded Science of Security lablet.
Prior to joining UIUC in 2003 he served on the faculties of the computer science departments at Dartmouth College (1996‐2003), and before that the College of William and Mary (1987‐1996). He has won recognition for excellence in teaching at all three universities. His research interests include trust analysis of networks and software, analytic modeling, and parallelized discrete‐event simulation, research which has led to the founding of startup company Network Perception, and election as Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the ACM. He is the inaugural recipient of the ACM SIGSIM Outstanding Contributions award, and co‐author of the widely used undergraduate textbook “Discrete‐Event Systems Simulation”.
Martin Otto
Head of Cybersecurity Research Group, Siemens Corporate Technology
Dr. Martin Otto is currently head of the research group “Cybersecurity Service Innovation” at Siemens Corporation, Siemens Technology, in Princeton, NJ, USA. His mission is to provide Siemens business units with technology solutions and innovations that enable Siemens to provide state of the art security services to customers. A specific focus is on helping Siemens customers that operate energy systems and other parts of nations’ critical infrastructure to detect, react to, mitigate, and otherwise defend against cyber attacks.
Dr. Martin Otto is a researcher and research manager with Siemens Technology, Siemens’ central R&D organization, since 2005. He held positions both in the US and in Germany, among them as global Head of the Siemens CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team). Before that he acquired a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2005 from Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany, working on fault attack side channels on smart cards, a topic that got him hooked on the field of IT and Cybersecurity, a field that has not lost its fascination ever since.
H. Vincent Poor
Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
H. Vincent Poor is the Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, where he is engaged in research in wireless networks, energy systems, and related fields. During 2006-16 he served as the dean of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. He has also held visiting appointments at a number of other universities, including most recently at Berkeley and Cambridge. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and a foreign member of the Royal Society and other national and international academies. Recent recognition of his work includes the 2017 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal and honorary doctorates from a number of universities in Asia, Europe and North America. Among his publications is the forthcoming book Advanced Data Analytics for Power Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Gil C. Quiniones
President and Chief Executive Officer, New York Power Authority
Gil C. Quiniones has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the New York Power Authority (NYPA), the nation’s largest state-owned electric utility, since 2011.
Mr. Quiniones guides the nation’s largest state-owned electric utility, with more than $3 billion in annual revenue with 16 generation facilities totaling over 7,000 megawatts and over 1,400 circuit-miles of transmission lines (one-third of the high-voltage transmission in New York State). Its energy services and customer solutions business accounts for more than $250 million annually.
Mr. Quiniones also oversees a 524-mile New York State main canal system, including the legendary Erie Canal, with many smaller feeder canals, 20 upland water reservoirs and hundreds of miles of waterside trails and has the launched “Reimagine the Canals initiative,” which has been designed to preserve the heritage of the Canal and promote its long-term sustainability.
Guiding the development and implementation of NYPA’s Strategic Vision 2020, Mr. Quiniones is technologically and culturally transforming 90-year old public utility that is taking a front line position in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s battle against climate change, seeking to be the first digital utility, end to end, played a pivotal role in re-electrifying Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria, and became the first North American utility to win the prestigious ISO 55001 International Asset Management certification.
As a well-known thought leader in the electric utility industry, Mr. Quiniones is focusing on the evolution of the post-COVID-19 energy market and championing inclusion and diversity in the utility workplace, as NYPA became the first utility energy company in the country to partner with the American Association of Blacks in Energy to increase African American representation.
Mr. Quiniones is Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Alliance to Save Energy and serves on the Boards of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the Large Public Power Council. He is also NYPA’s principal representative to the American Public Power Association.
Z. Jason Ren
Acting Center Director and Associate Director for Research; Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University
Jason Ren is the acting director for the Andlinger Center for 2020 and has been the associate director for research since 2019. He is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Jason is recognized as an international leader in environmental bioengineering with broad research areas linked to the “water-energy nexus.” He specializes in carbon valorization and energy recovery from waste streams. His lab analyzes reaction mechanisms and develop technologies for resource recovery during wastewater treatment, water desalination, and carbon capture processes. His goal is to enable a low-carbon circular economy with zero waste.