NEW MEXICO: EPSCoR researcher receives NSF CAREER Award
Ali Bidram, an Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico and a lead for the New Mexico NSF EPSCoR NM SMART Grid Center Architecture and Deployment teams, recently earned a prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for his project to improve power grids to ensure they are adaptively protected for modern conditions, such as high penetration of renewable energy sources. The five-year, $517,000 project began April 1 and continues through March 21, 2029.
Bidram said the work will focus on improving the resilience of power grids by designing a data-driven, adaptive protection platform that will take into account the needs for power systems in today’s high-demand environments. The resilience and reliability of power grids have become a growing issue in recent years in a world that increasingly relies upon electrical power for everything from computers, phones and even charging electric vehicles.
Through both hardware and software solutions, Bidram will design a protection platform that will be able to handle adaptive protection actions in transmission as well as distribution on electric power grids.