Group Leader, Optimization and Control Group
Group Leader, Optimization and Control Group

Biography

Karan Kalsi is the group leader for the Optimization and Control Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Since joining PNNL in 2010, Kalsi has established national recognition for his research in developing new control theory, methods, and algorithms for a rapidly changing, more complex, and more distributed energy system. He has made significant individual technical contributions in developing advanced control solutions to make the nation's critical infrastructure systems more reliable, resilient, efficient, and sustainable. His pioneering contributions have focused on developing a new control paradigm based on robust distributed control theory for enhanced bulk power system stability and reliability, designing multi-scale hierarchical control strategies that enable real-time coordination of distributed energy and renewable resources for increased distribution system reliability and novel economic-based control and optimization framework for coordinating and integrating buildings and distributed energy resources at grid-scale. 

Kalsi has had management oversight and technical responsibility for multi-million-dollar control-related projects that impact several Department of Energy (DOE) agencies, including the Building Technologies Office, Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability (OE) and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). He also served as the co-lead and chief scientist in the Deep Dive effort that led to the conception of the Control of Complex Systems Initiative (CCSI) in 2013. Subsequently, he led CCSI’s Theory Focus Area and then transitioned to the initiative deputy lead role where he worked with other focus area leads to assure successful completion of technical outcomes for all the projects in the initiative. His technical reputation, and the team that he has built, has made PNNL the premier laboratory in distributed control and optimization for large-scale energy systems. Kalsi provides the broad technical leadership necessary to fully take advantage of the large multi-disciplinary teams he assembles from across the national laboratory complex, academia, and industry. He is nationally and international recognized for his thought leadership and recognition across academia, industry, DOE, and professional societies. Kalsi has authored 70 peer-reviewed publications with over 2,400 citations and currently has seven issued U.S. patents.

Kalsi is also a visiting faculty member at the California Institute of Technology, where he partners with faculty on the topic of safety-critical controls for complex infrastructure systems. He received his PhD from Purdue University in electrical and computer engineering in 2010 and a Master of Engineering in electronic engineering from the University of Sheffield in 2006.