Donti recieves SIGEnergy Doctoral Dissertation Award

Priya Donti has been named the recipient of the 2022 ACM SIGEnergy Doctoral Dissertation Award. SIGEnergy established the annual award to recognize an outstanding Ph.D. thesis in the field of energy systems and informatics.

Donti received the award for her thesis, “Bridging Deep Learning and Electric Power Systems." 

Priya L. Donti received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, co-advised by Zico Kolter and Inês Azevedo. She is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Climate Change AI, a global non-profit initiative to catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning, which she is currently running through the Cornell Tech Runway Startup Postdoc Program. She will also join MIT EECS as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2023. Her research focuses on machine learning for forecasting, optimization, and control in high-renewables power grids. Specifically, her work explores methods to incorporate the physics and hard constraints associated with electric power systems into deep learning workflows. Priya is a recipient of the MIT Technology Review’s 2021 “35 Innovators Under 35” award, the Siebel Scholarship, the U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, and best paper awards at ICML (honorable mention), ACM e-Energy (runner-up), PECI, the Duke Energy Data Analytics Symposium, and the NeurIPS workshop on AI for Social Good.