Pearl Street Technologies was founded in 2018 in Pittsburgh, PA. Our mission is to enable a more reliable, resilient, and sustainable power grid through advanced modeling, simulation, and optimization tools.
Team
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
David began work on what would become SUGAR towards the end of his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University. He developed the original prototype power flow solver based on equivalent circuit models and was the lead author on the group's first publication on this work. Before starting Pearl Street he worked at Aurora Solar for two years, developing cloud simulation software for solar energy production modeling.
Co-founder and Chairman
Larry is the Department Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has pioneered the development of SUGAR. He has over thirty years of experience in developing software automation tools, and is well-known for his seminal work in circuit simulation algorithms in particular. He has formed and been involved with several successful startups in the electronic design automation and integrated circuit industries.
Co-founder and Chief Product Officer
Hui has 15 years of R&D experience in the electronic design automation industry. A few highlights include leading the development of Finesim Spice, the industry's first fully-parallelized circuit simulator, and Voltus, a massively-parallel IC power integrity solution with billion-node capacity. Hui's expertise extends to numerical methods, high-performance computing, and software development.
Chief Technologist
Marko spearheaded the development of SUGAR's optimization capabilities to support a variety of power system objective functions, from minimization of generation cost to optimal placement of new grid infrastructure. He has authored or co-authored 25 conference papers and 4 journal papers, including a best paper award-winning submission at the IEEE PES General Meeting in 2017. Marko was previously a nationally-ranked junior tennis player in Serbia, winning 12 major tournaments from 2008-2011.
Senior Product Engineer II
Joseph's background includes domestic and international experience in transmission and distribution systems planning, generation and battery energy storage interconnection, regulatory compliance, and power system data analytics. Prior to joining Pearl Street Technologies, Joseph was a power systems consultant at ABB (now Hitachi Energy). He is the co-author of numerous papers on topics ranging from power system model validation to assessment and applications of distributed energy resources in future power grids, and is a licensed professional engineer in North Carolina.
Senior Full Stack Software Engineer I
Alessandra completed her BS degree in Industrial Engineering at Texas A&M. While at A&M, Alessandra consulted with the GE Power RM&D team to reduce bottlenecks and optimize response time for servicing and repairing customers' aeroderivative gas turbine generators. Prior to joining Pearl Street Technologies, Alessandra was a full-stack engineer at ReStream. There she developed software and visualizations to analyze and monitor fluid chemistry in real-time, in order to resolve potential problems associated with oilfield fluids.
Computational Software Engineer II
John completed his MS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh where he studied electric power systems with a focus on control and machine learning applications. Prior to graduate school he worked for Wilderness Trace Solar in Danville, KY where he designed residential and commercial PV systems. He received his BS in Physics and Mathematics from Centre College where he was also an All-American cross country runner.
Frontend Software Engineer I
Mariella completed her BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Davis. As an undergraduate, she conducted research at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne where she worked on a team to develop organic electronic sensors for applications in wearable smart textiles. Her previous work includes research at the Cornell Nanoscale Science and Technology Facility where she helped develop an ultrasonic transducer fabrication process flow for biological applications.
Senior Software Engineer II
David has 6 years of experience in the electronic design automation industry. During that time he contributed innovative software solutions to support scalable and efficient physical verification of cutting-edge, multi-billion transistor integrated circuit designs. His software development background includes high-performance distributed computing and concurrent programming. He has an MS degree in Computer Engineering and BS degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University.
Product Architect
James Thomas has experience in several aspects of project development including interconnection, solar site selection, preliminary design, origination, LMP analysis, and project M&A through working at a renewable energy developer and engineering consulting firm. A Milwaukee, Wisconsin native, James graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. He also earned a Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Doctor of Philosophy from the Georgia Institute of Technology. James has concentrated in power throughout his extensive education and focused on power system dispatch optimization algorithms during his Ph.D. Away from work, James enjoys day hikes in the Rocky Mountains and spending time with his wife and two sons.
Senior Full Stack Software Engineer II
Richard has made a career of taking outdated processes and creating optimized solutions to drive business decisions. He was a major contributor to the development of a shop floor product tracking system for one of the world's largest paper manufacturing and distribution companies. Richard earned his Eagle Scout and was proficient at designing and implementing both hardware and software systems before graduating with a B.S. degree in Computer Information Systems from Kennesaw State University.
Senior Full Stack Software Engineer I
Matt completed his BS degree in Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University, where he took an additional focus in math and computer science. While at A&M he also was an undergraduate research assistant within the nuclear engineering department, working on GPU based random number generation. Prior to joining the Pearl Street team, he worked on a wide variety of projects as a software engineer in different industries including Test & Measurement, Industrial IoT, and Finance.
Senior Full Stack Software Engineer II
Jean has over 10 years of full stack software development experience. Prior to working at Pearl Street, she led development on an event website that processed over 10 million tickets a year. Jean's previous roles include work as a radar engineer and data analyst. She received her BS in Electrical Engineering at Stony Brook University with a concentration in digital signal processing. Jean lives outside of Philadelphia with her wife, two children, and two dachshunds.
Distinguished Architect
Altan has been a co-founder/architect/technical lead in 4 startups, all of which have been acquired by industry leaders in the electronic design automation (EDA) sector. In his last venture, he was the architect of RedhawkSC, a highly scalable on-chip power grid simulation and analytics platform, which is used in design flows for most of the world's silicon chips by major semiconductor design companies. Before joining Pearl Street, he was an Ansys Fellow. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Senior Data Engineer I
Noel completed his MS degree in Applied Mathematics and BS degree in Computational Science at Stevens Institute of Technology. During his studies, Noel conducted research on stochastic optimization problems to determine the control policies of electrical microgrids. Prior to joining Pearl Street, Noel spent 3 years working on high frequency trading systems at a large investment bank.
Senior Software Engineer II
Lucas has 9 years of software engineering experience across several industries. Initially focused on industrial process automation and control, he then helped build a large food delivery platform for restaurants. Through an interest in combating climate change and a fascination with the design of the electrical grid, he then furthered his education at Carnegie Mellon where he focused on power flow simulation of transmission and distribution grids. He has a BA in Physics from Goshen College and an MS in Energy, Science, Technology, and Policy from CMU.
Senior Software Engineering Manager
Christine has over 9 years experience in the tech industry working for companies like Carbon Health, Audible, and Amazon. As an engineering manager her focus has been employee retention, project management, and process improvement. Christine has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Brown University. In her spare time, she enjoys baking bread, kayaking, and visiting national parks.
Advisors
Matt started at Apple, building the software team for 10 generations of the iPod, was one of the first engineers on the original iPhone and was involved in the development of 5 iPhone generations, and the first iPad. As co-founder of Nest, Matt built the team that built the first machine learning thermostat and the leading connected home brand. Now, as co-founder of Incite.org, Matt looks for the first-movers that will cause positive, catalytic change in the venture capital, non-profit and political space.
Emily Kirsch is the Founder and CEO of Powerhouse and the Founder and Managing Partner of Powerhouse Ventures, which backs entrepreneurs building the future of energy and mobility. Emily launched and hosts the Greentech Media podcast Watt it Takes and serves on the Investment Advisory Board of NYSERDA. In 2019 Emily was selected as a World Economic Forum Global Leader. Her work has been cited in Bloomberg, The Guardian, TechCrunch, and The New York Times.
Amritanshu (Amrit) Pandey is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Vermont. He works on computation-focused technologies for electrical energy systems that help combat climate change. He develops these technologies using fundamentals from circuit theory, optimization, physics-constrained machine learning, and numerical methods. In the past, he and his colleagues pioneered the development of a novel circuit-theoretic simulation and optimization framework for power grids. This work has won several best paper awards, including two best-of-the-best paper awards at IEEE PES General Meetings.
Dr. Baldick is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He has undergraduate degrees from the University of Sydney, Australia, and graduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. His current research involves optimization, economic theory, and statistical analysis applied to electric power systems, particularly in the context of increased renewables and transmission. Dr. Baldick is a Fellow of the IEEE and the recipient of the 2015 IEEE PES Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award.
Jay Apt is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and in the CMU Department of Engineering and Public Policy. He is the Co-Director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center and Director of the RenewElec (renewable electricity) project. Professor Apt received an A.B. in physics from Harvard College in 1971 and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal and the Metcalf Lifetime Achievement Award for significant contributions to engineering.
Granger Morgan is the Hamerschlag University Professor of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is Co-Director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center. He is a member of the National Academy of Science where he serves as the co-chair of the Report Review Committee. He is also a member of the Amereican Academy of Arts and Science. He serves on the Energy Advisory Committee of PNNL. He is previous chair of both EPA's Science Advisory Committee and of the Advisory Council of the Electric Power Research Institute.
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