Enrique Mallada, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, been chosen by the National Science Foundation for its prestigious CAREER Award, which recognizes early stage scholars with high levels of promise and excellence.
Using this $500,000, five-year grant, Mallada and his group aim to enable the integration of renewable energy sources into the existing power grid in an efficient and reliable manner through the development of a new generation of decentralized controllers, distributed algorithms, and market designs.
As part of the grant, he and his team will also work through the Center for Educational Outreach with students in the Women in Science and Engineering program, which brings area high school students to campus laboratories. In one project, WISE students will design and implement Arduino-based devices—”synthetic” fireflies—that can synchronize in a distributed way. In another, the high school students will work on a small power system testbed that will help illustrate some of the proposed algorithms being developed as part of Mallada’s team’s research.