Enrique Mallada is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. He has secondary appointments in the departments of Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Statistics, and Computer Science. He is the director for the Networks, Dynamics, and Learning Laboratory (NetDL2ab), a core member of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS), a core member of the Ralph O’Conner Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI), and an affiliate of the Laboratory of Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR).
Mallada’s research interests cover a diverse set of areas, including control and dynamical systems, networks and graph theory, mathematical optimization, and machine learning, as well as their applications in engineering and science. In a broad sense, his lab seeks to develop new tools and algorithmic solutions devoted to the analysis, design, and operation of large-scale and/or highly-coupled networked systems in an efficient and reliable manner. The work encompasses several application areas such as data, social and biological networks, as well as electric power grids. He holds two patents for his work.
Current projects include real-time optimization with feedback for efficient and robust optimization of infrastructure networks, structured sparse recovery for networked inverse problems, optimization-based online trajectory planning of multi-agent UAV systems, and several projects devoted to improving electric power grid efficiency and resilience. These include voltage collapse stabilization for preventing power grid blackouts, dynamic control for improving the performance of low inertia power systems, and control and market participation of distributed energy resources.
Mallada has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Caltech’s Center for the Mathematics of Information Fellowship, the Cornell ECE Director’s Research Thesis Award for his dissertation, the Cornell University’s Jacobs Fellowship, and the Organization of American States scholarship from 2008 to 2010. He has also received numerous awards at JHU for research and mentoring, including the Discovery Award, Catalyst Award, and the Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award.
Mallada is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Control System Society’s Technical Committee on Smart Grids, the Transactive Systems Hybrid Economic-Control Theory Experts panel, and faculty advisor for the Johns Hopkins University chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. He has been co-chair of the 53rd Annual Conference on Information Science and Systems in 2019 (CISS 2019) and helped organize several meetings as a technical program committee member, including the ACC 2019, CISS 2017, and IEEE Smart-GridComm in 2017 and 2018.
Mallada received his bachelor’s degree in telecommunications engineering from Universidad ORT in Uruguay in 2005. He earned his PhD in electrical and computer engineering, with a minor in applied mathematics, from Cornell University in 2014, then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Mathematics of Information at the California Institute of Technology. He joined the Whiting School of Engineering faculty in 2016.