Sanders appointed to NIST Smart Grid Advisory Committee

2/15/2013 Rick Kubetz, College of Engineering

William H. Sanders, director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory, has been appointed as a member of the newly formed Smart Grid Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Written by Rick Kubetz, College of Engineering

William H. Sanders, director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory, has been appointed as a member of the newly formed Smart Grid Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

William H. Sanders
William H. Sanders
William H. Sanders

Sanders, a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is one of 15 leaders from a cross-section of U.S. industry, academia, and trade and professional organizations who will advise the NIST director Patrick Gallagher on Smart Grid programs and activities.

"We will benefit greatly from the knowledge and insights of this diverse group of experts," said Gallagher. "We are grateful for their willingness to serve and to share their thinking on how NIST can maximize its technical contributions to modernizing and securing the nation's electric power grid."

The new committee will advise Gallagher on the direction of NIST's Smart Grid-related programs and activities. NIST leads a nationwide effort to expedite development of consensus interoperability standards that enable two-way flows of energy and information on the Smart Grid. NIST also conducts Smart Grid research and testing programs on cyber security and advanced performance-monitoring devices known as synchrophasors, energy management systems for buildings, and other topics.

Sanders is currently the director and principle investigator of the DOE/DHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) Center, which is at the forefront of national efforts to make the U.S. power grid smart and resilient. Led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the TCIPG Center includes researchers from Dartmouth College, Washington State University, the University of California at Davis, and Cornell. TCIPG's goal to drive the design of an adaptive, resilient, and trustworthy cyber infrastructure for transmission and distribution of electric power which can operate through attacks. Funded at $18.8 million for a five-year period (2009-2014) by the Department of Energy and Department of Homeland Security, the project builds on past successes supported by the National Science Foundation since 2005.

Sanders's own research interests include secure and dependable computing and security and dependability metrics and evaluation, with a focus on critical infrastructures. He has published more than 200 technical papers in those areas. He is also co-developer of three tools for assessing computer-based systems: METASAN, UltraSAN, and Möbius. Möbius and UltraSAN have been distributed widely to industry and academia; more than 500 licenses for the tools have been issued to universities, companies, and NASA for evaluating the performance, dependability, and security of a variety of systems. He is also a co-developer of the Loki distributed system fault injector, the AQuA/ITUA middlewares for providing dependability/security to distributed and networked applications, and the NetAPT (Network Access Policy Tool) for assessing the security of networked systems.


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This story was published February 15, 2013.