Javad Lavaei is an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at UC Berkeley. He was an assistant professor at Columbia University from 2012 to 2015.
He received the Ph.D. degree in control and dynamical systems from the California Institute of Technology in 2011, and was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University for one year. He is the recipient of the Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize for the best university-wide Ph.D. thesis, entitled "Large-Scale Complex Systems: From Antenna Circuits to Power Grids."
He has won several awards, including DARPA Young Faculty Award, DARPA Director's Fellowship, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, Office of Naval Research's Director of Research Early Career Award, Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Resonate Award, Google Faculty Research Award, and Governor General of Canada Academic Gold Medal. Javad Lavaei is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and of the IEEE Control Systems Letters, and serves on the conference editorial board of both IEEE Control Systems Society and European Control Association. He is a recipient of the 2015 Power & Energy Society PSACEC paper award, the 2015 INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers, the 2016 Donald P. Eckman Award given by the American Automatic Control Council, the 2016 INFORMS ENRE Energy Best Publication Award, and the 2017 SIAM Control and Systems Theory Prize.
Through his UC Noyce Initiative project, “Cyberattack Detection for the U.S. Power Grid Using Machine Learning and AI Techniques,” Lavaei plans to use AI and machine learning to develop cyberattack detection algorithms for the U.S. power grid.