Molzahn Selected for IEEE PES Outstanding Young Engineer Award

Daniel Molzahn has been named as the recipient of the 2021 IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Outstanding Young Engineer Award. Molzahn will be recognized with this award at the IEEE PES General Meeting, to be held July 25-29 in a virtual format. 

This award is presented to engineers who are 35 years of age or younger for technical and educational achievements and for involvement in local/transnational IEEE PES activities and leadership, professional society activities, and community and humanitarian activities. 

Molzahn has been an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) since 2019. His research focuses on improving power system reliability and resiliency by developing and analyzing algorithms that help engineers better design and operate power grids. Challenges addressed by his work include power flow nonlinearities, large-scale problems, stochasticity from renewables, and the transition from centralized to distributed paradigms. His major contributions to the field are in power flow nonlinearities, large-scale security-constrained optimal power flow, and distributed optimization. 

Molzahn is a leader for the Power Systems Computation Conference (PSCC). He currently serves as the chair of the technical program committee for the 22nd PSCC to be held in 2022; he was the vice-chair of the technical program committee for the 21st PSCC held in 2020. Molzahn has also been a reviewer and session chair for earlier editions of the PSCC and a member of past technical program committees. He and his colleagues won second place at the U.S. Department of Energy ARPA-E Grid Optimization Challenge in 2020. He was a guest associate editor for special issues of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and the IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics. 

At Georgia Tech, Molzahn is a fellow of the Strategic Energy Institute and the faculty advisor for the Georgia Tech Energy Club. He is also involved in activities with the U.S. National Academy of Engineers (NAE). Molzahn was invited to attend the NAE-organized 2019 German-American Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) Symposium, and he accepted a request to serve on the organizing committee for the 2020 EU-US NAE FOE Symposium, which will now be held in November 2021.