Rosemary E. Alden, an electrical engineering senior in the University Scholars Program (USP), was recently awarded the First Prize in the Undergraduate Student Poster Contest organized during the 2020 IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) General Meeting (GM). The conference, which typically gathers more than 2,500 participants, had this year’s edition originally scheduled for Montreal, Canada but was held online due to the pandemic conditions.
The award-winning poster, “Tradeoffs in Forecasting of Residential Electric Loads with Data from Smart Meters and Intelligent Circuit Breakers,” covers Alden’s most recent research on advanced topics of smart buildings and grids. Last year, her earlier work on smart plugs for electric power monitoring was published in an IEEE conference proceedings paper at ICRERA 2019 and received an Honorable Mention in the Oswald Undergraduate Research Competition at UK. Alden is a national IEEE PES Plus Initiative Scholar and currently serves as the chair for the new IEEE PES student chapter at UK.
As a USP student, Alden is integrating her BS and Ph.D. studies. She is also pursuing the PEIK certificate. Her research in the current academic year will be supported by an NSF REU supplement to the project “Crosslayer Optimization of Energy and Cost through Unified Modeling of User Behavior and Storage in Multiple Buildings.”
Alden started her research at UK in the fall of 2018 in the SPARK Laboratory and is advised by Dan M. Ionel, FIEEE, ECE Professor, L. Stanley Pigman Chair in Power, and PEIK Director.