Mapping the future of power

Postdoctoral fellow Sergio Dorado-Rojas aims to build a more sustainable and reliable electric grid.

Before joining the program, Dorado-Rojas earned his PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. As a fellow, he aims to create a “Google Maps” for power grids, helping operators reroute electricity around congestion and outages in real time. His work combines accurate grid modeling, AI-based demand forecasting, and rapid optimization to manage strain from data centers, reduce wildfire risks, and accelerate renewable energy integration. He shared what drew him to Northwestern and what he hopes to accomplish as a fellow.

What do you find most exciting about the Northwestern University Sustainability and Energy Fellows program?

Everything! Northwestern is a dream school to me. The first time I remember hearing about it was watching The Devil Wears Prada back home in Colombia. Eventually, I became aware of the university’s reputation and academic stature. This program is investing in the next generation of leaders in sustainability and energy. I’m especially excited to explore how we can take our work beyond academia, even by starting our own companies.

What stood out to you about this fellowship opportunity compared with other postdoctoral programs?

The university’s research capabilities and the Trienens Institute's inherent interdisciplinarity are central to what I am aiming to achieve with my research. The problems I am working on require diverse teams and efforts, and I think that there are few places in the world better than Northwestern to tackle these challenges.

Also, the time span is three years. That’s a differentiating factor because postdoctoral appointments are typically one or two years. To me, three years is the sweet spot. It allows enough time to make real progress, and that's especially important when you're trying to do something genuinely new. So, applying was a no-brainer when I saw the call.

What will you work on during your fellowship?

I like to describe my work as developing a "Google Maps" for the power grid. The grid has many possible paths to route electricity, and operators can open and close connections to send power down different "highways." Today, they mostly do this only in emergencies, such as a line failure. My research aims to turn it into an everyday tool that relieves congestion the way a navigation app reroutes you around a traffic jam. Two obstacles stand in the way. The first is speed: finding the best reconfiguration is computationally intensive, too slow to run continuously across a large system. The second is safety: a route that looks fine on paper can destabilize the equipment connected to the grid.

At Northwestern, I'll use machine learning to make that search fast enough to run in real time, and I'll develop methods to confirm a new route is safe before operators rely on it. The payoff is getting far more out of the infrastructure we already have, just as demand from data centers and electrification surges.

How does your research help address real-world challenges in energy or sustainability?

My research could help the industry integrate more renewables and extract greater value from existing infrastructure to meet surging data center demand. Additionally, the same rerouting tools can help California reduce wildfire risk by safely de-energizing high-risk lines. In France, I’ve been working with the grid operator RTE to bring more renewables online.

I've also drawn on how other networked systems (such as transportation) are operated to shape these early solutions, and I expect the exchange to run both ways, with what I develop for the grid proving useful elsewhere. That's another reason this Fellowship is ideal: the cohort offers plenty of opportunities to discuss problems with researchers in other fields.

What do you hope to learn from your fellowship experience and your mentors in particular?

What's unique about the Fellowship is the chance to transcend my own expertise as a power engineer by working alongside people from other disciplines in a cohort.

As for my mentors, I chose them purposefully. I'll work with Professor Ermin Wei, whose expertise is large-scale, distributed optimization, and Professor Niall Mangan, who specializes in uncovering the hidden dynamics of complex systems from data. Both are masters of methods I'm eager to learn, and they've applied those methods to power as one application among many. What excites me is the complementarity: their methodological depth paired with my hands-on knowledge of the grid.

I don't think the solutions to the problems I'm working on will come from any one community working as a silo: they'll come from combining strengths like these. I see this Fellowship as the ideal place to bring the latest advances in applied math and optimization into the grid, and I’m certain I’ll learn an enormous amount in the process.

What do you look forward to about your time at Northwestern and in the Evanston and Chicago area?

The quality of Northwestern’s faculty and research staff is at the top, elite level. That's a unique opportunity to enrich my career by interacting with these world-class researchers. It’s a great location as well. Last year, I was in Chicago around Saint Patrick's Day, and it was about 20 degrees Celsius (68°F). I went to the lake with my wife, and we said, “We would move here. We really love this place.” Then, less than a year later, we're moving there.

I’m also looking forward to the weather. I love the cold. I’ve been living in Atlanta for the last couple of years, and the heat has been too much for me. I'm originally from South America, but I'm from the mountains. My city's nickname is "the freezer" because it's cold, but I like it that way.

Outside of your work, do you have any hobbies or interests you would like to share?

I'm a runner, and my weekly goal is to run more than 40 kilometers. Also, before I started my PhD, I was an amateur DJ. I still have all the gear; it gathered dust during my PhD, but I'm looking forward to picking it up again.

I also love learning languages. I speak four languages fluently: English, Spanish, Italian, and German, and I enjoy the cultural aspects of each, such as reading books or watching movies in their original languages. I also love food, which is why I'm looking forward to the Chicago food scene!