ECSE Prof. Luigi Vanfretti Selected as Invited Professor by ECL, Lyon, France

ECSE Prof. Luigi Vanfretti was selected as an invited professor by the scientific council of École Centrale de Lyon (ECL) in Lyon, France for Summer 2025. He will be spending his summer in Lyon, where he will teach a short PhD course on power system dynamics and continue his research collaboration with Xavier Bombois. This continues a fruitful collaboration with the ECL, where our former graduate student Meaghan Podlaski was also received as a visitor in 2021 through the support of the Chateaubriand fellowship program.

Luigi Vanfretti received his Electrical Engineering Degree from Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala in 2005, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electric power engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA, in 2007 and 2009, respectively. He is Full Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since July 2022, where he was a tenured Associate Professor June 2017- June 2022. At RPI, he leads research projects in his laboratory and with his research team, ALSET Lab, in the domains of electrical power systems and aircraft electrification. Prior to joining RPI he was with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, from 2010-2017 as Assistant and tenured Associate Professor. Concurrently, he worked at Statnett SF, the Norwegian grid operator, as Special Advisor from 2013-2016 and as a consultant. 

Professor Vanfretti has held temporary posts in prestigious international institutions, in 2019 he was a Visiting Faculty at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia; in 2022 he was a Visiting Professor at École Centrale de Lyon and the SuperGrid Institute, both located in Lyon, France; and from 2023-8 to 2024-3 he was Visiting Faculty at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs., Cambridge, MA.

His research interests are in “electrified systems,”' and include cyber-physical system (CPS) modeling, simulation, stability and control in the domains of power grid and electrified transportation, both vehicles and infrastructure. In addition, he performs research on synchrophasor technologies, both on technology development and data analytics, and is interested in the application of software technologies, signal processing, system identification and machine learning for design and operation analytics for power systems.