Presenter Bios

Art Anderson, Pacific Gas & Electric
Art Anderson is the manager of the Smart Grid Communication Lab, which is part of the Business Technology team for Electric Operations at PG&E. Art is responsible for evaluating new technology solutions as part of the evolving SmartGrid. Art’s team evaluates new technology, new or evolving standards, and how these developments can potentially affect our business. Art has over 25 years of information technology experience in software development, testing, and management. He has been involved in the PG&E 9 million meter SmartMeter deployment from design through full deployment. Art holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

Dave Bakken, Washington State University
Professor Dave Bakken is a Professor of computer science at Washington State University. His research interests include dependable distributed computing and design of new kinds of middleware. He has been working closely with WSU’s power researchers for 15 years to help fundamentally rethink grid communications. Bakken is the Chief Architect of the GridStat project and is involved with the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative (NASPI), specifically its emerging NASPInet initiative. His research is partly on the availability component of cyber security: real-time, wide-area data delivery for power grids. He is also working with Hauser on security technologies to help secure GridStat’s data delivery plane and its management plane. Bakken was lead organizer of a new workshop, Trustworthiness of Smart Grids (ToSG), at the DSN 2014 (leading dependable computing) conference. At the instigation of IEEE Power & Energy Society President and TOSG keynoter, Miroslav Begovic, the next ToSG workshop will be at IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT) in DC February, 2016.

Katherine Davis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Dr. Katherine Rogers Davis is a Research Scientist in the Information Trust Institute (ITI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include data-enhanced power system modeling and analysis, security-oriented cyber-physical techniques for studying the interdependencies of electrical and cyber infrastructures, and making algorithms more robust with respect to untrustworthy inputs. She has worked closely with other TCIPG researchers at the University of Illinois on the protection of the power grid. Davis received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007 and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 and 2011, respectively. Before joining ITI, she worked as a Software Engineer and Senior Consultant at PowerWorld Corporation as well as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in ECE at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Matt Davis, PowerWorld
Matt Davis received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Louisiana Tech University in 2002 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Currently he is working at PowerWorld Corporation. His research interests include linear sensitivities, power system analysis, power system visualization, and power system operational reliability.

Adam Hahn, Washington State University
Adam Hahn is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University. His research interests include cybersecurity of the smart grid and cyber-physical systems (CPS), including intrusion detection, risk modeling, vulnerability assessment, and secure system architectures. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University in 2006 and 2013. Previously he worked as a Senior Information Security Engineer at the MITRE Corporation supporting numerous cybersecurity assessments within the federal government and leading research projects on CPS security.

Jeremy Jones, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jeremy Jones came to the University of Illinois Information Trust Institute after many years in IT and development operations in industry. In industry, Jones led projects such as large-scale Web search build-out and datacenter operations for several start-ups as well as established companies. At ITI, he is in charge of testbed operations for the TCIPG research lab. He is also interested in distributed computing, operations automation, and self-service and auto-scaling of testbed resources.

Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Dr. Zbigniew T. Kalbarczyk is Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Kalbarczyk’s research interests are in the area of design and validation of reliable and secure computing systems. His current work explores emerging technologies, such as resource virtualization to provide redundancy and assure system resiliency to accidental errors and malicious attacks. Currently, he is a lead researcher on the project to explore and develop high availability and security infrastructure capable of managing redundant resources to foil reliability and security threats, detect errors in both the user applications and the infrastructure components, and recover quickly from failures when they occur. Dr. Kalbarczyk’s research involves also analysis of data on failures and security attacks in large computing systems, and development of techniques for automated validation and benchmarking of dependable and secure computing systems using formal (e.g., model checking) and experimental methods (e.g., fault/attack injection). He served as a program Chair of Dependable Computing and Communication Symposium (DCCS), a track of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2007 and Program Co-Chair of Computer Performance and Dependability Symposium, a track of the DSN 2002. He has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. Dr. Kalbarczyk has published over 130 technical papers and is regularly invited to give tutorials and lectures on issues related to design and assessment of complex computing systems. He is a member of the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance.

Akhlesh Kaushiva, P.E., U.S. Department of Energy. Akhlesh Kaushiva is in the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability with the Department of Energy. He has been actively involved in the Smart Grid Investment Grant projects sponsored by DOE as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He is also involved in the Smart Grid Cybersecurity aspect of the projects. Prior to joining DOE he had a long career in the electric utility industry and served in various capacities in the area of System Planning, Power Distribution, Outage Management, Mobile Dispatch, and GIS. He has a BSEE with Honors from the University of Maryland and a MS degree in Computer Science from the George Washington University. He was a Senior Member of IEEE and is a Registered Professional Engineer in the District of Columbia. He is also a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu Association.

Matt Luallen, CYBATI
Matthew Luallen currently serves as a co-founder of Dragos Security and of CYBATI. The two companies collectively focus on cyber-protecting critical infrastructure and control systems through products, research and education.

Scott Mix, North American Reliability Corporation
Mr. Scott R. Mix, CISSP, joined NERC in October 2006 following more than 25 years of experience working in various facets of the electricity industry, including as a consultant with KEMA, Inc., Infrastructure Security Manager with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Senior Security Analyst at the PJM Interconnection, and more than ten years with Leeds & Northrup Co. as a programmer/analyst and systems architect. For more than twenty years, he has focused on the areas of Computer and Infrastructure Security for the Electricity Sector. At NERC, he is a staff subject matter expert for Critical Infrastructure Protection standards issues, and participates in the ongoing development of the revisions to the NERC CIP Standards. He has also been the NERC Staff Facilitator for the Critical Infrastructure Protection Committee (CIPC) and several of its working groups and task forces. Throughout his career prior to joining NERC, Mr. Mix worked closely with numerous industry and government organizations, including NERC’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Committee (CIPC) and its predecessors, its working teams, was the inaugural convener of the Control System Security Working Group, was an active and vocal observer to the NERC Cyber Security Standards Version 1 Drafting Team (and the NERC 1200 process before that), and was a member of the OASIS “How” Working Group. He has also worked with the Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission dealing with specific Electricity Sector security issues. He has organized and presented at numerous industry symposia, both domestically and internationally. He has been a member and chapter secretary of the Philadelphia Chapter of InfraGard, is a member of the ISA and has participated in the ISA99 and ISA100 standards activities, and is a member of the IEEE as well as its Computer Society, Power Engineering Society, and Standards Association. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). Mr. Mix is a graduate of the Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer & Information Science and Chemistry.

Paul Myrda, Electric Power Research Institute
Paul Myrda is a Technical Executive with the Electric Power Research Institute working in the Power Delivery and Utilization Sector. Currently he is program manager for the Information and Communications Technology for transmission at EPRI. Previously, Paul was Director of Operations and Chief Technologist overseeing planning and asset management functions for Trans-Elect’s operating companies. Paul has over 30 years of experience that includes planning, engineering, information systems and project management. He has an MBA from Kellogg and MSEE and BSEE from Illinois Institute of Technology. He is a licensed professional engineer, and a member of the IEEE and CIGRE.

Klara Nahrstedt, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professor Klara Nahrstedt is the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Director of Coordinated Science Laboratory. Her research interests are directed toward trustworthy multimedia distributed systems and networking, quality of service (QoS) and resource management in Internet and mobile systems, real-time security in wireless networks for trustworthy power grids, and 3D tele-immersive systems. She is the recipient of the Early NSF Career Award, the Junior Xerox Award, the IEEE Communication Society Leonard Abraham Award for Research Achievements, the 2008 University Scholar Award, the 2009 Humboldt Research Award, the 2012 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, and the 2014 ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) Technical Achievement Award. She was the editor-in-chief of the ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems journal; associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications; associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia; associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security; general co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2006; and general chair of IEEE PerCom 2009. She was the chair of the ACM SIGMM between 2007-2013. Nahrstedt received her Diploma in mathematics – numerical analysis from Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, in 1985. In 1995, she received her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and member of Leopoldina German National Academy of Sciences.

David M. Nicol, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professor David M. Nicol is the Franklin W. Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Director of the Information Trust Institute. Previously he held faculty positions at the College of William and Mary and at Dartmouth College. His research interests include high-performance computing, simulation modeling and analysis, and security. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the ACM for his contributions in those areas. He is co-author of the widely used textbook Discrete-Event Systems Simulation and was the inaugural awardee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Simulation’s Distinguished Contributions Award, for his contributions in research, teaching, and service in the field of simulation.

Masood Parvania, Arizona State University
Dr. Masood Parvania is a postdoctoral scholar with the School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at Arizona State University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral scholar with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California Davis. His research interests include resiliency and reliability of cyber-physical energy systems, stochastic operation optimization of competitive electricity markets, and sustainable renewable energy integration. Prior to joining UC Davis, he was a Research Associate with the Robert W. Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he dedicated his research to development of stochastic optimization frameworks for the integration of demand response (DR) and distributed energy storage systems in electricity market operation. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, in 2013, where he received the Outstanding Research Accomplishment Award. Dr. Parvania is the Chair of the IEEE PES Task Force on Reliability Impacts of Demand Response Integration.

Victoria Pilliterri, National Institute of Standards
Vicky Pillitteri is an advisor for information systems security in the Computer Security Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), specializing in control systems cybersecurity. She is the Chair of Smart Grid Interoperability Panel Cybersecurity Committee, and serves as an ex-officio Director of the Board. In addition to her work in Smart Grid, she was part of the NIST team supporting Executive Order-13636, Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, is a co-chair of the Cybersecurity and Privacy subgroup of the Cyber-Physical Systems Public Working Group, a member of the Joint Task Force Transformation Initiative Interagency Working Group, and leads the Smart Grid and Cyber-Physical Systems cybersecurity projects at NIST. Ms. Pillitteri holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, a M.S in Computer Science from the George Washington University, and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional.

Edmond Rogers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Edmond Rogers (CISSP) is a Smart Grid Cyber Security Engineer for the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois. Before joining ITI, Rogers was actively involved as an industry participant in many research activities in ITI’s TCIPG Center, including work on NetAPT (the Network Access Policy Tool) and LZFuzz (Proprietary Protocol Fuzzing). Prior to joining ITI, Rogers was a security analyst for Ameren Services, a Fortune 500 investor-owned utility, where his responsibilities included cyber security and compliance aspects of Ameren’s SCADA network. Before joining Ameren, he was a security manager and network architect for Boston Financial Data Systems (BFDS), and a transfer agent for 43% of all mutual funds. He began his career by founding Bluegrass.Net, one of the first Internet service providers in Kentucky. Rogers leverages his wealth of experience to assist ITI researchers in creating laboratory conditions that closely reflect real-world configurations.

William H. Sanders, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professor William H. Sanders is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering and Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, a past Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing, and past Vice-Chair of the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing. He was the founding Director of the Information Trust Institute (www.iti.illinois.edu) and previously served as Director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (www.csl.illinois.edu) at Illinois. Dr. Sanders’s research interests include secure and dependable computing and security and dependability metrics and evaluation, with a focus on critical infrastructures. He has published more than 200 technical papers in those areas. He is currently the Director and PI of the DOE/DHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) Center (www.tcipg.org), which is at the forefront of national efforts to make the U.S. power grid smart and resilient. He is also co-developer of three tools for assessing computer-based systems: METASAN, UltraSAN, and Möbius. Möbius and UltraSAN have been distributed widely to industry and academia; more than 500 licenses for the tools have been issued to universities, companies, and NASA for evaluating the performance, dependability, and security of a variety of systems. He is also a co-developer of the Loki distributed system fault injector, the AQuA/ITUA middlewares for providing dependability/security to distributed and networked applications, and the NetAPT (Network Access Policy Tool) for assessing the security of networked systems.

Peter W. Sauer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professor Peter W. Sauer holds the W. W. Grainger Chair in Electrical Engineering in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois. He is working on projects related to power system operational reliability. These include the modeling and simulation of loads, generators, and smart grid components. They also include the challenge of dynamic modeling of renewable resources such as wind turbines and solar arrays. Issues such as low inertia generation are being examined to determine their impact on contingency analysis, system recovery following disturbances, and automatic generation control. Sauer is a co-founder and Site Director of the NSF-sponsored Power Systems Engineering Research Center. He served as the program director for power systems at the National Science Foundation from September 1991 to August 1992. He was a cofounder and chairman of the Board of Directors of PowerWorld Corporation from 1996 to 2001. He served in the U.S. Air Force as a facilities design engineer from 1969 to 1973 (Langley AFB, VA) and 1982 to 1998 (Chanute AFB and Scott AFB, IL). He is a registered professional engineer in Virginia and Illinois, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

Jana Sebestik, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jana Sebestik is the Assistant Director for STEM Curriculum Design in the Office for Mathematics, Science and Technology Education (MSTE) in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She coordinates TCIPG education efforts to develop a variety of educational opportunities designed to engage learners of all ages. She is the author of the 4-H SET curriculum “The Power of the Wind.” She taught in the Urbana School District for 34 years before coming to MSTE.

Komal Shetye, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Komal S. Shetye is a Senior Research Engineer in the Information Trust Institute (ITI), at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests lie in power system dynamics, and assessing the impact of geomagnetic disturbances (GMD) on the power grid. She has been involved in a number of projects at ITI, primarily through the Illinois Center for a Smarter Electric Grid (ICSEG) funded by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. She has worked on several GMD vulnerability studies with major utilities in the US, such as AEP, ComEd, ITC, ATC, Entergy, and Avista, and with EPRI on evaluating the impacts of GMDs on the North American Interconnections. She also actively participates in the NERC GMD Task Force that is working on developing reliability standards to make the power grid resilient to GMD. Currently, she is working on a project with the Bonneville Power Administration to improve dynamic simulations of their system, towards validation with real-world dynamic response. She has previously held industry internships at corporations including Crompton Greaves Ltd., Honeywell Automation, and Schneider Electric. She holds a B.Tech. in EE from the University of Mumbai (2009) and earned an MSEE in Power Systems (2011) from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a member of the IEEE and the IEEE Power and Energy Society.

Anurag Srivastava, Washington State University
Dr. Anurag K. Srivastava is an assistant professor of electric power engineering at Washington State University and the director of the Smart Grid Demonstration and Research Investigation Lab (SGDRIL) within the Energy System Innovation Center (ESIC). He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2005. He has worked as an assistant research professor at Mississippi State University from 2005-2010, as a senior research associate at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, and as a research fellow at the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand. His research interests include power system operation and control using smart grid data. Dr. Srivastava is a senior member of the IEEE, chair of the IEEE Power & Energy Society’s (PES) student activities committee, co-chair of the microgrid working group, past-chair of the IEEE PES career promotion subcommittee, and past chair of the IEEE synchrophasor conformity assessment program. He is the recipient of the best paper award from the IEEE Industry Applications Society and is working closely with a number of electric power companies. Dr. Srivastava is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, an IEEE distinguished lecturer, and the author of more than 160 technical publications including a book on power system security.

Andrew Wright, N-Dimension Solutions
Andrew Wright has 20 years of experience in industrial research and development, holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University, and has published numerous technical papers and patents. He guides N-Dimension’s technical strategy for cyber security products and solutions for the smart grid, and has been actively involved in numerous customer engagements and cyber security deployments. He collaborates with various industry working groups, including NIST, SGIP, NESCOR, and TCIPG

Tim Yardley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Tim Yardley is the Associate Director of Technology and a Senior Researcher at the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His primary duties focus on defining the vision and direction for applied research through emerging technology as well as conducting research to address the core mission of his institute. His research is focused in trustworthiness and resiliency in critical infrastructure with particular focus on cyber security in systems like the power grid and telecommunications. Through developing advanced testbed environments, Mr. Yardley helps to apply research to prove out theory and validate those efforts prior to field deployment, speeding the process of technology transition and the realism of fundamental research. In carrying out these roles, his work covers a variety of areas, including control systems, telecommunications systems, critical incident response, and simulations of real-world systems. Other areas of interest include health technology, mobile system security, financial systems, and dynamically tailored environments. Beyond research, Mr. Yardley is involved in security assessments, external relations, national working groups, technology development and transfer and entrepreneurial activities. Through being an active contributor in open source projects around the world and having come from Industry, Mr. Yardley provides a unique perspective with a proven track record of solving difficult problems.

Saman Zonouz, Rutgers University
Saman Zonouz is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rutgers University since September 2014 and the Director of the 4N6 Cyber Security and Forensics Laboratory. Before, he held a tenure-track position at the University of Miami for three years. His research has been awarded NSF CAREER Award in 2015, Google Security Award in 2015, the Faculty Fellowship Award by AFOSR in 2013, the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE SmartGridComm 2013, the University EARLY CAREER Research award in 2012 as well as the Provost Research Award in 2011. The 4N6 research has been funded by National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Department of Energy – Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (DOE ARPA-E), WinRiver, Google, and Fortinet Corporation including tech-to-market initiatives. Saman’s current research focuses on systems security and privacy, trustworthy cyber-physical critical infrastructures, binary/malware analysis and reverse engineering, as well as adaptive intrusion tolerance architectures. Saman has served as the chair, program committee member, and a reviewer for international conferences and journals. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science, specifically, intrusion tolerance architectures for the cyber-physical infrastructures, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011.