J. Charles Smith – Executive Director

Charlie is a member of the IEEE Power and Energy Society; a member of CIGRE, the International Council on Large Electric Systems; a US representative to the IEA Wind Annex Task 25 on Design and Operation of Power Systems with Large Amounts of Wind Power, and a Fellow of the IEEE. He is a guest editor for the IEEE Power and Energy magazine, and a past editor for the IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy. He is a recipient of the IEEE PES Ramakumar Family Renewable Energy Excellence Award, and currently serves as the Technical Advisor to the US National Committee for IEC SC 8A, Grid Integration of Renewable Energy Generation.

He received his BSME and MS degrees from MIT in 1970. He currently is the Executive Director of the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG). Previously, he served as President of Electrotek Concepts, an international power engineering consulting firm. He has 50 years of experience in the electric power industry.

 

Debra Lew – Associate Director

Debbie is the Associate Director of ESIG and has a background in wind, solar and distributed energy resource integration with a focus on 100% clean energy. She was previously a consultant, a senior technical director at GE Energy Consulting, and held a variety of roles during her 16-year tenure at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, including secondment to the Hawaiian Electric Company. She is the Immediate Past Chair of the IEEE Power & Energy Society’s Wind and Solar Power Coordinating Committee. She has a PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University and a BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics from MIT.

 

 

Julia Matevosyan – Chief Engineer

Julia is ESIG’s Chief Engineer and has more than 20 years of experience in the power industry. Prior to joining ESIG, Matevosyan was the Lead Planning Engineer of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). In her time with ERCOT, she worked on adequacy of system inertial response, system flexibility, frequency control and performance issues related to high penetration levels of inverter-based generation and ancillary services market design. Julia received her BSc from Riga Technical University in Latvia, and her MSc and PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden.

 

 

Mark O’Malley – Chief Scientist

Mark is the Professor of Electrical Engineering at University College Dublin. He is the Chief Scientist of the Energy Systems Integration Group having recently completed a three-year assignment as Chief Scientist, Energy Systems Integration at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA. At NREL he co-led the establishment of the Global Power System Transformation Consortium and is the co-chair of the Research Agenda Group.

He is a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London.

 

 

Ryan Willis – Director, Marketing & Operations

Ryan is the Director of Marketing & Operations and leads and coordinates ESIG’s marketing and communications efforts and manages the organization’s operational activities. He has more than 15 years of marketing and communications experience, having most recently served as Vice President of Ackermann Marketing and PR.

While at Ackermann, Willis managed a number of ESIG initiatives, including overall communications efforts, social media, webinars and renaming and rebranding the organization.