Women in Power

This enlightening volume examines core areas of development in electric power systems, emphasizing the pivotal contributions of women engineers to the industry’s evolution. The authors cover a broad spectrum of key topics, including generation technologies, transmission and distribution progress, environmental challenges, worldwide electrification, and workforce issues. Advances in conventional and renewable energy technologies, in parallel with growing environmental concerns, and in conjunction with the aging of both the infrastructure itself and the workforce, have led to imposing and fascinating challenges for the engineers of tomorrow. This book documents the critical role of women engineers and their pioneering discoveries, relates their stories of success and struggle in their own words, and shares their perspectives on how these challenges will be addressed in the decades ahead.

Jill S. Tietjen is the President and CEO of Technically Speaking, Inc. An electrical engineer, she has spent more than 45 years in the electric utility industry where she provided planning consulting services to electric utilities and organizations comprising the electric utility industry and served as an expert witness before public utility commissions and other government agencies. In 2015, she served as the CEO of the National Women’s Hall of Fame, based in Seneca Falls, New York (the birthplace of women’s rights). Today, she is a worldwide advocate for telling women’s stories and writing women into history. An author and international speaker, Tietjen is the co-author of the award-winning and bestselling books Her Story: A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America and Hollywood: Her Story, An Illustrated History of Women and the Movies. Her introduction to engineering textbook, Keys to Engineering Success, was published by Prentice Hall in 2001. Her ebook for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Women in Engineering series titled Recognizing and Taking Advantage of Opportunities was published in 2016. She is the series editor for Springer’s Women in Engineering and Science series and wrote the inaugural volume (published in 2016), Engineering Women: Re-visioning Women’s Scientific Achievements and Impacts. She has since written a second volume in the series, Scientific Women: Re-visioning Women’s Scientific Achievements and Impacts (published in 2020). She blogged for The Huffington Post from 2014-2018. Her award-winning book Over, Under, Around, and Through: How Hall of Famers Surmount Obstacles was published in 2022. Tietjen graduated from the University of Virginia (Tau Beta Pi, Virginia Alpha) with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics (minor in Electrical Engineering) and received her M.B.A. from the University of North Carolina – Charlotte. She is a registered professional engineer in Colorado.
Marija D Ilić, isa Professor Emerita at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She currently holds a  joint appointment of an Adjunct Professor in EECS Department and  of a Senior Research Scientist at the  Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS)  at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is an IEEE Life Fellow and an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and the Academia Europaea.  She was the first recipient of the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award for Power Systems in the US.  She has co-authored several books on the subject of large-scale electric power systems, and has co-organized an annual multidisciplinary Electricity Industry conference series at Carnegie Mellon with participants from academia, government, and industry.  She was the founder and co-director of the Electric Energy Systems Group (EESG) at Carnegie Mellon University.  Currently she is building EESG@MIT, in the same spirit as EESG@CMU. Mostrecently she has offered an open EdX course at MIT entitled ``Principles of Modeling, Simulations and Control in Electric Energy Systems”. She is founder and chief scientist at New Electricity Transmission Solutions (NETSS), Inc, currently SmartGridz, Inc.
Lina Bertling Tjernberg is a Professor in Power Grid Technology at KTH the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. She was previously Professor at Chalmers University of Technology, 2009-2013, and with the National grid 2007-2009. She completed her Ph.D. in Electric Power Systems at KTH in 2002. She is the Director of the KTH Energy platform, which coordinates and supports new research initiatives within the energy areas across KTH. She is a fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) since 2022. She received the 2021 Power Woman of the Year award for her work as a "strong force and guarantor of more equal skills provision in today's and future sustainable energy systems". Herresearch and teaching are focused on developments of the sustainable electric power grids with special interest in reliability analysis and asset management. She is senior member of IEEE and a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES). She has served as Secretary, respectively Treasurer of the IEEE PES Governing Board (2012-2016) and chair of the Sweden PES Chapter (2009-2019). She was an officer on the board of the IEEE PES Subcommittee on Risk, Reliability and Probability Applications (RRPA) 2007-2013 and was the conference general chair of the 9th Probabilistic Methods Applied for Power Systems (PMAPS), 2006, Stockholm. She has been a member of the editorial board of the IEEE PES Transactions of Smart Grid, arranged the first PES ISGT Europe conference 2010, and is a member of the steering committee. She is a member of the ISGAN Academy of Smart Grid, the National Committee of CIRED, and she is part of the expert pool for the EU commission.
Noel N. Schulz is the Edmund O. Schweitzer III Chair in Power Apparatus and Systems in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University Pullman. She has been a Chief Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) since February 2020. She has a joint appointment at PNNL as part of the PNNL/WSU Advanced Grid Institute (AGI).  In August 2021, she started her role as Co-Director of AGI. Dr. Schulz has been active for over 29 years in teaching, research and service at six U.S. universities. In research and graduate studies, she has graduated 45 MS and 15 PhD students; published 180 papers and 2 book chapters; and brought in over $40M in external research through individual and collaborative projects including a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER award. Dr. Schulz is an IEEE Fellow and a renowned expert in power systems engineering who researches the use of modeling, simulation and intelligent systems to solve problems inpower system design, operations and controls. She is the US administrative lead for the US DOE funded $30M project, US-India Collaborative for Smart Distribution System with Storage (UI-ASSIST), involving 15 US partners and 15 Indian partners. In addition to her technical activities, Dr. Schulz has been very involved in activities related to the recruitment, retention and advancement of women and multicultural students and professionals in STEM careers. For her contributions in advancing recruitment and retention of women in IEEE and engineering professions, Schulz was named the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Education Society Hewlett-Packard Harriet B. Rigas Award. She is also an advocate for advancing the power engineering workforce. Dr. Schulz served 12 years on the IEEE Power & Energy Society Governing Board including two years, 2012 and 2013, as PES President. Schulz has a bachelors and a masters in electrical engineering, both from Virginia Tech, as well as a doctorate in electricalengineering from the University of Minnesota.