ENGINEERING

Carnegie Mellon University’s Gabriela Hug has received the National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award, its most prestigious award for junior faculty.

Hug, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering andengineering and public policy, was awarded a five year, $400,000 grant to make the electric power grid more secure and flexible.

"This grant will help me develop tools to enable a self-managing grid by the means of ubiquitous power flow control. The main goal is to make the transmission grid more flexible so that it can adjust to the increasingly varying power flows caused by variable renewable generation. The resulting grid management scheme will reduce the cost to transition to an efficient and sustainable electric energy supply system," Hug said.

Hug reports that she is recommending a "distributed approach" to grid operations, which is capable of handling the computational complexity resulting from the placement of a large number of power flow devices in the system.

"This is wonderful recognition for a very innovative and pioneering researcher working on systems and solutions so critical to improving the nation’s critical infrastructure," said Ed Schlesinger, the David Edward Schramm Memorial Professor and head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at CMU.

In addition to conducting award-winning research at CMU, Hug is the co-director of the Electric Energy Systems Group, the leader of the thrust area on Transmission and Distribution Management in the Smart Grid Research Center and a member of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center.

She obtained her master’s degree (2004) and Ph.D. (2008) in electrical and computer engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and a diploma in higher education teaching from the same institution in 2007.