News and Announcements

[2026]

• 06/2026 Publication Alert! Congrats Jiajun on our new paper in the inaugural PowerUp 2026 conference! We've modeled transmission reconfiguration actions, including line switching and bus splitting, and found a limitation of existing models: highly detailed models are computationally intractable, while reduced models may limit feasible switching actions. We propose a bus-breaker model as an intermediate modeling resolution and formulate reconfiguration as a tractable MILP. Simulations on IEEE 14-, 30-, and 118-bus systems show that bus splitting can improve feasibility and reduce costs, particularly under high loading and tight switching budgets. Jiajun will present his work in Boulder, CO in September.

• 06/2026 Publication Alert! Congrats Kevin on our new paper in the inaugural PowerUp 2026 conference! We've continued to develop computationally tractable algorithms for high-resolution power system planning. We extend our previous work to develop a multi-year investment planning algorithm that can solve out to 2045 with an <0.1% optimality gap within 30 hours for a 2000-bus Texas grid. Kevin will present his work in Boulder, CO in September.

• 05/2026 The IES Energy Symposium was back for a second year! Thank you to Laura Frye-Levine (MIT), Sarah Baird (Let There Be Light International), and our own Tony Reames and Amanda Ullman for joining me on our panel "Systems Integration in the Energy Transition: Grid, Community, and Health". Thank you to the audience for your engagement, insightful questions and discussion. At the symposium, Garrett showcased his project on water and energy system modeling for data center integration at the Student Poster Session.

• 05/2026  Welcome Yuyang Tian! Yuyang is masters student in ECE. He joins our group as a graduate researcher and will be working on accelerating OPF and price prediction.

• 03/2026 A pleasure hosting Benoît Jeanson from RTE for a special IES Seminar event on his PhD work on network reconfiguration under de-energization.

• 03/2026 Joined Michigan State University's Institute of Public Utilities (MSU IPU) for their Power Grid School I lecture series, where I gave a crash course on interconnected power systems and reliability.

• 03/2026 Returned to GeorgiaTech and AI4OPT, where I am an Affiliate Faculty, to give a seminar on accelerating optimization for power systems.

• 02/2026 Thank you Water@Michigan and the Graham Sustainability Institute for inviting me to the Coffee Talk Series. I shared our ongoing Graham-funded project on "Data Centers, Energy, and Water Systems: Modeling the Impacts on Infrastructure, Environment, and Affordability". Our stakeholder interviews have provided our team with an in-depth understanding of the data center industry, and system modeling and reporting gaps at the intersection of water and energy systems. We will be continuing this work over the next year and look forward to engaging with the community again!

• 02/2026 Thank you to the U-M Institute for Energy Solutions for hosting me to give a seminar! Constructive conversations on accelerating large-scale optimization for power systems.

• 01/2026 Publication Alert! Congarts Kevin on our new paper in PSCC 2026! In this work we propose a PTDF-based multicut Benders algorithm to solve high-resolution power systems planning. Challenges of scale are addressed using a warm-start technique and a trust-region stabilization that reduces oscillations during optimization. This paper will be presented at PSCC in Cyprus this summer!

• 01/2026 Had a great visit to Wayne State University as part of the ECE Seminar Series. A pleasure to share our group's work on scaling algorithms for power systems planning and operations using optimization and machine learning techniques.

[2025]

• 10/2025  Welcome Magdalene Callender! Magdalene is an undergraduate student in the LSA honors college with a major in Program in the Environment (PitE). She joins our group as an undergraduate researcher. 

• 09/2025  Welcome Jiarui Gao! Jiarui is an undergraduate student in IOE, with interests in optimization and ML for power systems. She joins our group as an undergraduate researcher. 

• 08/2025  Welcome Jiajun Han! Jiajun is joining our group as a PhD student in CEE.

• 08/2025  Welcome Harris Sofios! Harris is joining our group as a graduate researcher in CEE.

• 07/2025 Pre-print Alert! Check out our recent work where we develop machine learning based proxies for solving the transmission network reconfiguration (TNR) problem, with bus splitting events. This particular kind of TNR is achieved by selectively opening breakers within a substation, and allows fine-grained adjustments of network topology by changing bus connectivity. We propose a two-stage neural architecture to (1) predict flow-maximizing topologies; and (2) reconcile hard constraints of power physics and breaker connectivity. Great collaboration with Dekang Meng and Pascal Van Hentenryck at GeorgiaTech at AI4OPT.

• 07/2025 Presenting at SIAM Annual Meeting for the Mini Symposium on Digital Twin and its Applications; and the PES General Meeting for a panel session on community resilience

• 05/2025 Welcome Garrett Alston! A graduate from our CEE undergraduate program, Garrett will be starting his masters in Fall 2025 and joins our group as a masters researcher.

• 05/2025 Thank you Institute for Energy Solutions for inviting me to collaborate on the inaugural Energy Symposium! Bringing together researchers across U-M and our peer institutions, we had multiple panels on "What (Energy Issue) Is Keeping You Up at Night?" Our panel, co-organized by Ruiwei Jiang (U-M IOE) focused on the power system and "“Keeping the lights on”, touching on a variety of challenges including emerging large loads like data centers, widespread proliferation of distributed energy resources, wildfires and extreme weather, and different approaches to mitigating these challenges. 

• 03/2025 Selected by the NSF Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA) to join a visioning workshop on engineering research to catalyze resilient rural communities. Thanks University of Iowa for hosting us, and looking forward to the report and future research collaborations to come!

• 02/2025 Had a great visit to University of Wisconsin Madison as a part of the NEEP Seminar Series, where I shared our work on fast algorithms (aka physics-informed machine learning) and equitable frameworks (our new work on Locational Marginal Burden) for renewable-rich power systems.

• 02/2025 Great to give a talk at UM's Electric-Water Utility Resilience Summit and interact with utility operators, government officials, and fellow academic researchers on critical topics of resilience. Great conversations and many directions for impactful future work!

• https://news.engin.umich.edu/2025/02/utilities-face-common-challenges-need-collaboration-as-challenges-grow/

• 02/2025 Join me at UM's inaugural Sustainable Lab Summit, where I will be presenting our work on optimization and AI algorithms that center questions of energy justice, as leaders of a just energy transition. 

• 01/2025 Welcome Lauren May! Lauren is an undergraduate student in LSA studying data science and a minor in the Environment. She joins our group as an undergraduate researcher.

[2024]

• 12/2024 Join me and UM's Sustainable LSA for a workshop on "Greening the Cloud: Sustainability in AI and Technology". During my presentation, I'll discuss sustainability and how AI+tech can both help and hurt sustainability goals. After, engage with us during our interactive workshops with critical conversations in a cross-disciplinary group

• 12/2024 Pre-print Alert! Keeping up with the energy transition where new loads and generators are being rapidly connected to the grid, we need to consider Transmission Expansion Planning and flexibility offered from resources like storage. Check out our recent work in this space, where we study planning of transmission lines and storage on a high spatial resolution of the Texas grid. More to come in this space from Kevin Wu, PhD student co-advised with Pascal Van Hentenryck at GeorgiaTech.

• 10/2024 Amanda and I attended INFORMS 2024 in Seattle to share our work exploring the energy equity implications of the power grid

• 09/2024 Publication Alert! Our paper on physics-informed machine learning for power systems reconfiguration is now available on Transactions on Smart Grids! 

• 08/2024 Publication Alert! Congarts Richard on our new paper at NAPS 2024! In this work we investigate the impact of data on voltage predictions using a simple ML model. We find that different data generation methods will impact prediction performance, and as should be expected, a richer dataset generated from multiple methods outperforms more homogenous datasets. 

• 07/2024 Thanks Epistimi and the Henry Luce Foundation for inviting me to teach at the Epistimi Leadership Workshop for Women in Energy, at the American College of Greece!

• 06/2024 It was a busy month with presentations from our group at two key conferences: Sam and Amanda presented at the ACM e-Energy conference in Singapore (paper), while Jules and I presented at the Power Systems Computation Conference in Paris (paper). Wonderful to see many colleagues and meet new collaborators!

• 04/2024 Thanks Women's Energy Network for the invitation to speak on an Education Panel: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in the Energy Industry

• 03/2024 Publication Alert! Congrats Sam and Amanda on our new paper at the ACM e-Energy conference! In this work we quantify the equity of optimal power flow solutions through the Locational Marginal Burden. 

• 03/2024 As we approach World Water Day (March 22) I was interviewed by GeorgiaTech ISyE to discuss my research on sustainable energy systems.
  "Haider’s work underlines the critical importance of collaborative efforts and systemic thinking in shaping a sustainable future, emphasizing that progress and environmental responsibility must advance hand in hand for the benefit of all."

• 03/2024 I was pleased to give a seminar at the Ralph O'Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI) at Johns Hopkins University

• 02/2024 I was pleased to give a seminar at the University of British Columbia

• 02/2024 I was pleased to give a seminar at the Energy Systems Innovation Center (ESIC) at Washington State University

• 02/2024 I was pleased to give a seminar at the University of Michigan

• 02/2024 Our paper on graph neural networks for power systems has been accepted to the Power Systems Computational Conference! We are looking forward to attending the conference in Paris this summer. 

[2023]

• 10/2023 Attending the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix! Had a wonderful time connecting with colleagues and had some great conversations on my presentation on physics-informed ML and differentiable end-to-end learning for power systems.

• 10/2023 Pre-print Alert! Checkout our new work on graph neural networks for power system reconfiguration! We're continuing to push in the direction of physics-informed machine learning for mixed integer problems applied to power systems. This work was done in collaboration with Jules Authier, and is a key result of his masters thesis. Physics-Informed graph neural network for dynamic reconfiguration of power systems.

• 07/2023 Attending the 6th UI-ASSIST Annual Meeting and PES General Meeting in Orlando, to present my research in smart distribution grids: electricity market design, storage integration, and distributed grid services.

• 06/2023 Publication Alert! Join me at the ACM e-Energy workshop on Energy Data and Analytics where I'm presenting our paper on a project-driven DER dataset for the US grid. This work is a result of my internship with Microsoft Research and in collaboration with Breakthrough Energy.

• 06/2023 Our new Technical Report on the Behind-The-Meter Distributed Energy Resources is now available on the IEEE PES Resource Center! Our contributions on emerging market and business models, and future needs via interactions with policymakers can be found in Chapters 6 and 7.

• 05/2023 I'm chairing a session at the IISE Annual Conference on Machine Learning in Energy Systems Analysis and will be presenting my research in physics-informed ML for power systems.

• 05/2023 I was awarded the Aarav Amar Bajpayee Memorial Prize in recognition of my research contributions to sustainability.

• 05/2023 Pre-print Alert! Physics-informed machine learning for power systems reconfiguration: Grid-SiPhyR: An end-to-end learning to optimize framework for combinatorial problems in power systems.

• 03/2023 Publication Alert! Our new survey paper on voltage regulation is now available!

• 01/2023 Join me for the Young Scientists Lecture in the Energy Visions Seminar series: I'll be discussing our work on retail electricity market design.