Johanna Mathieu receives 2020 Henry Russel Award

Johanna Mathieu, Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received a University of Michigan Henry Russel Award for her extraordinary record of accomplishment in scholarly research, as well as excellent record of contributions as a teacher. This award, established in 1925, is considered the University’s highest honor for faculty at the early to mid-career stages of their career.

Mathieu is a national leader on research to reduce the environmental impact, cost and inefficiency of electric power systems. Her research is helping to improve the efficiency and reliability of the power grid while integrating renewable energy and reducing economic costs. Specifically, she develops theories, algorithms and tools to implement new strategies that actively engage distributed flexible resources such as energy storage devices, electric loads such as household appliances, and small-scale renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind. Her work is improving the power grid’s reliability, economics, and environmental impact.

Mathieu’s research is intrinsically interdisciplinary, and she has collaborated with researchers from other departments within the College of Engineering, as well as researchers in the School for Environment and Sustainability, and the Ford School. She currently is leading a $2.9 million ARPA-E Open 2018 project with collaborators from industry, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and UC Berkeley to test some of the most promising distributed energy resource control strategies to improve the nation’s power grid functionality. In another project, she is using buildings as batteries, and conducting experiments on 13 U-M buildings.

As an educator, she has developed two graduate-level courses in power systems that attract students from a variety of disciplines, and restructured an undergraduate course focusing on grid integration of alternative energy sources to enable participation by students from a variety of disciplines. In addition, she co-developed the short course Grid 101, held at the U-M Energy Institute, and created the Interdisciplinary Power System Seminar Series.

Mathieu regularly includes undergraduate students in her research, and several became co-authors on papers. Graduate students she has mentored have received several best paper awards and a variety of fellowships.

Mathieu joined the department in 2014. She has published more than 32 papers in leading journals, received several best paper awards, and is an editor of IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, the premier journal in her field. She is Vice-Chair of the IEEE Power and Energy Society Smart Buildings, Loads, and Customer Systems Technical Committee.

Mathieu has received the NSF CAREER Award, and was selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2019 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.

Announcement in the University Record