Alumni

Kate worked as a doctoral student and postdoctoral researcher at RRE from 2020-2025. Her work focused on justice-informed energy systems planning in the support of building fair and low-carbon energy systems. Kate applied mathematical optimisation, statistical modelling, and policy coding in her work.

Behnam Akbari was a PhD student and postdoctoral researcher at RRE from 2019 to 2025. He worked on the modeling flexibility in integrated power and gas networks for sustainable energy systems.

Laya Das was a postdoctoral researcher at RRE from 2021 to 2025. He worked on machine learning applied to power systems.

Paolo joined RRE in early 2020 and was a senior researcher when he left the group at the end of 2023. He contributed to several research projects related to power purchase agreements, multi-​energy systems, low-​temperature energy networks, and CO2 and hydrogen value chains.

Beatrice was a postdoctoral researcher in the Future Resilience Systems (FRS) programme. Her current research focused on enhancing existing and developing new methods for assessing the resilience of cyber-physical systems, i.e. the electricity grid and the open communication network, with the ultimate goal of identifying optimal recovery schemes for their recovery from disruptions.
 

Salvo was a postdoc with RRE until fall 2023. His reasearch focused on the development of a probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) framework for power transmission systems. He investigated the impact of high winds speeds to the safety and security of the Swiss transmission system.

Ehsan was a Postdoc at RRE until June 2023. He worked on developing analytical methods for assessing the security of power grids.

Hossein worked as postdoc at RRE until 2023. His work focused on developing image recognition tools for detection of objects (healthy and faulty) at a power line.  

Steffen was a PhD student and PostDoc at RRE until 2022. His work focused on modelling and improving the resilience of transport systems. Hi methods and tools involved Bayesian inference, agent-​based modelling, autoencoder neural networks, time series analysis, and simulation-​based optimisation.

Huadong received the B.E. degree in automation from University of Science and Technology of China, China in 2012 (Outstanding Graduate); and the Ph.D. degree in systems engineering and engineering management from City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong in 2016 (Outstanding Academic Performance Award for Research Degree Students 2013-15 at City University of Hong Kong). At RRE, he worked from 2016 to January 2019 on several topics, including reliability modeling and optimal maintenance of networked control systems, real-time power management of energy systems with communication networks, vulnerability analysis and resilience increase of cyber-physical systems, and data-driven modeling of residential energy use and renewable energy resources.  

Beginning of 2015, Yiping joined the Risk and Reliability Engineering Laboratory. His research interests concentrate on the study and development of advanced computational methods for risk, vulnerability and resilience analysis of critical infrastructures (e.g. electrical power grids, energy-carrier networks), in particular their vulnerability and resilience assessment, optimum design and protection under operational uncertainties and external risks (e.g. natural disasters, terrorist attacks), and optimization methodologies for large-scale combinatorial problems, including stochastic optimization, robust optimization and artificial intelligence.

Linda Brodnicke did her PhD at RRE from 2021 to 2025, focusing on fostering decentralized sector-coupled energy systems.

Alissa Ganter defended her PhD thesis, entitled "Decarbonizing European hard-to-abate industries: The role of hydrogen and its infrastructure" in 2024.

Felix Kottman defended his PhD thesis, entitled, "Enhancing Human Performance in Power Grid Recovery - Optimization of Repair Planning and Assessment of Restoration Operations", in February 2023.

Raphael Wu defended his PhD thesis, entitled "Assessment and Optimal Design of Sustainable, Secure and Affordable Active Distribution Networks", in August 2021.

Alexander worked on improving the reliability and resilience of interdependent energy carrier networks by means of numerical and theoretical approaches. He defended his PhD in August 2020.

Andrea joined RRE as a PhD student in November 2014. In our group, he performed resilience assessments on the coupled operations of the electric and gas networks. In particular, he focused on the integration of renewables into critical energy infrastructures and alternative conversion technologies, as power-to-gas. He successfully passed his doctoral examination in September 2018.

From 2014 to 2018, Dhruv pursued a PhD at RRE and the Paul Scherrer Institute, modelling and assessing human reliability with applications in radiotherapy.

Bing Li completed her PhD at RRE in 2018. Her research was centered around 1) the development of hybrid analytical and computational tools suitable for analyzing and simulating cascading failures and 2) the applications of control and optimization techniques in energy systems.