I am an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology working on electric power systems. I also hold an affiliate appointment as a computational engineer in the Energy Systems Division at Argonne National Laboratory, where I was a research staff member from 2015 through 2018. I completed the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013 and the Dow postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan in 2015. My research interests focus on developing optimization and control algorithms to improve the reliability, resiliency, equity, and efficiency of electric power systems.

Contact Information

• Email: molzahn@gatech.edu
• E176 Van Leer
  777 Atlantic Drive NW
  Atlanta, GA 30313, USA

Education

University of Michigan

• Dow Postdoctoral Fellowship, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (2015)

University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Ph.D. Electrical Engineering (2013)
• Master's of Public Affairs (2012)
• Master's of Electrical Engineering (2010)
• Energy Analysis and Policy Graduate Certificate (2010)
• Bachelor's of Science with majors in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics (highest distinction honors) (2008)

News

• December 2, 2024: Babak Taheri defended his dissertation "Improving Power System Approximations Through Machine Learning-Inspired Optimization Methods" to complete the PhD degree. He will be starting a research scientist position at Hitachi Energy. Congratulations Dr. Taheri!


• October 24, 2024: PhD student Richard Asiamah received a 2024 Spark Award from Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute.


• October 15, 2024: PhD student Richard Asiamah was the first runner-up for the Best Graduate Presentation award at the 56th North American Power Symposium for his paper Performance Assessment of Data Sampling Strategies for Neural Network-based Voltage Approximations.


• September 18, 2024: Alejandro Owen Aquino defended his dissertation "Offline Simplification and Reduction Strategies for Online Solution of Power System Optimization Problems" to complete the PhD degree. He will be starting a staff scientist position at Sandia National Laboratories. Congratulations Dr. Owen Aquino!


• August 31, 2024: The University of Houston published a "Public Historians at Work" podcast on the project "Algorithms and Power Systems Architecture: Using Historical Analysis to Envision a Sustainable Future" funded by the Sloan Foundation. This podcast consists of a discussion among three of the project's PIs (Daniel Molzahn, Sairaj Dhople, and Julie Cohn).


• July 17, 2024: Mohannad Alkhraijah defended his dissertation "Cybersecurity-Aware Distributed Optimization for Optimal Power Flow" to complete the PhD degree. Congratulations Dr. Alkhraijah!


• June 3, 2024: Daniel Molzahn was elected as a member of the Executive Board for the Power Systems Computation Conference.


• May 29, 2024: Daniel Molzahn received the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Engineering Outstanding Teacher Award (Early Career).


• April 26, 2024: Daniel Molzahn received the Georgia Institute of Technology Class of 1940 W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award, which recognizes the top junior faculty member at Georgia Tech for excellence in teaching.


• April 26, 2024: Daniel Molzahn received a Georgia Institute of Technology Center for Teaching and Learning Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award.


• March 15, 2024: Student leaders Tristan Ziegler, Owen Mason, Danielle Abalde, Prateek Yadav, Ryan O'Meara, and Max Yuan of the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) team "Gaming for Electric Power Grids" presented their work in developing video games on power grid resilience at the spring Georgia Tech Advisory Board meeting.


• March 4, 2024: The Department of Energy awarded $4.2 million for DerGuard, a comprehensive approach for improving the cybersecurity of distributed energy resources.


• January 25, 2024: PhD student Richard Asiamah was elected as the president of the ECE Graduate Student Organization.


• December 7, 2023: Paprapee Buason defended his dissertation "Sample-Based Power Flow Approximations: Computational Methods, Analysis, And Applications" to complete the PhD degree. He will be starting a postdoc position at Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of the Advanced Network Science Initiative in January 2024. Congratulations Dr. Buason!


• August 30, 2023: PhD students Mohannad Alkhraijah and Rachel Harris presented their research on the cybersecurity of distributed optimization algorithms and the energy war in Ukraine to approximately 30 staffers from Georgia's congressional delegation.


• July 21, 2023: PhD student Richard Asiamah was selected to participate in Eaton's inaugural emPOWER U Leadership Summit. Moreover, Richard was selected as one of the top six GEM interns from NREL to present at the national GEM conference in September, a participant in the NextProf Pathfinder Workshop in October, and the RCE Atlanta SDG Fellows program.


• July 13, 2023: PhD student Daniel Turizo Arteaga received an inagural INSPIRE Fellowship from Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering to work on projects at the intersection of power system optimization and cryptography in collaboration with Professor Saman Zonouz and Yongyu Xie.


• April 13, 2023: Daniel Molzahn received the Georgia Tech Roger P. Webb ECE Junior Faculty Award ( video ).


• February 24, 2023: Daniel Molzahn's project "Algorithms and Power Systems Architecture: Using Historical Analysis to Envision a Sustainable Future" funded by the Sloan Foundation was highlighted in an article in the Georgia Tech ECE newsletter.


• November 10, 2022: PhD student Rachel Harris was the student highlight in the November issue of the AI4OPT Newsletter. Rachel was recently selected to a position on the AI4OPT Student Leadership Council. She also received the 2022 Spark Award from Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute.


• October 26, 2022: Daniel Molzahn's VIP Team "Gaming for Electric Power Grids" was highlighted in a Georgia Tech College of Engineering news article.


• October 20, 2022: Recent BS/MS graduate Abigail Ivemeyer was highlighted as one of 11 women profiled in a Georgia Tech article "Celebrating 70 Years of Women at Tech", with her specific profile available here. Abi received Georgia Tech's 2021 Roger P. Webb ECE Undergraduate Research Award, recognizing the top undergraduate researcher in ECE, and the 2022 IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Outstanding Student Scholarship, an international recognition of the top 20 undergraduate and masters students pursuing power engineering. Abi is the first author of a paper published at the 2021 IEEE Power and Energy Conference at Illinois (PECI) with collaborators at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.


• February 22, 2022: Daniel Molzahn received the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award for his proposal titled "CAREER: Overcoming Nonlinearities, Uncertainties, and Discreteness to Mitigate the Impacts of Extreme Events on Electric Power Systems".


• February 10, 2022: Daniel Molzahn and Anurag Srivastava wrote the IEEE Power and Energy Society's "Trending Tech" email for February 2022 on distributed optimization.


• October 24, 2021: The GO-SNIP Team composed of Frank Curtis (Lehigh University), Andreas Wächter, Ermin Wei (Northwestern), Elizabeth Wong (UCSD), and Daniel Molzahn (Georgia Tech) finished sixth/seventh in the Department of Energy's Grid Optimization Competition Challenge 2. GO-SNIP had the second-most number of best scores for each problem among all teams for Challenge 2 (107 out of 480 problems) and the most second-best scores (132 out of 480 problems).


• May 5, 2021: Daniel Molzahn is the recipient of the 2021 IEEE PES Outstanding Young Engineer Award for contributions to the theory and practical application of nonlinear optimization algorithms for electric power systems.


• February 12, 2020: The GO-SNIP Team composed of Frank Curtis (Lehigh University), Andreas Wächter, Ermin Wei, Ruby Tushen (Northwestern), Elizabeth Wong (UCSD), and Daniel Molzahn (Georgia Tech) finished second overall in the Department of Energy's Grid Optimization Competition Challenge 1.