Sustainability and Energy Fellow
2026 Cohort
PhD program: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Fellowship mentors: Ermin Wei, PhD, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Niall Mangan, PhD, Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering
Sergio A. Dorado-Rojas received his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. He also holds a B.Sc. in electrical engineering and an M.Eng. in industrial automation from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (the first electrical engineering undergraduate recipient of the Manuel Ponce de León award), and two M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering and computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. As a DAAD fellow, he completed an exchange at the Technische Universität München. As a 2025 Chateaubriand STEM Fellow, he conducted part of his doctoral research at CentraleSupélec (Université Paris-Saclay), in collaboration with the French transmission system operator RTE.
His research at Northwestern focuses on developing the power grid equivalent of Google Maps. Just as a navigation app reroutes drivers through side streets when a highway is congested, such a system would enable grid operators to redirect electricity flows by reconfiguring the power grid with no new infrastructure required. His work provides the missing tools to do this at scale: methods to build an accurate model of how the grid is actually behaving in real time (the live traffic map), and to find the best network configuration near-instantaneously using machine learning (the route optimizer).
Together, these advances could relieve congestion from surging data center loads, reduce wildfire ignition risk from energized power lines, and accelerate the integration of renewables without waiting a decade for new transmission infrastructure.