Yonghong Chen is a Chinese-American operations researcher and electrical engineer who works as a chief scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. Her research involves the application of mathematical optimization to market design and operations of electric power transmission. [1]
Chen earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Southeast University in Nanjing in 1990, and a master's degree from the Nanjing Automation Research Institute in 1993. After continuing to work at the Nanjing Automation Research Institute from 1993 to 1998, she completed a PhD in electrical engineering at Washington State University in 2001. [2] Her dissertation, Development of automatic slow voltage control for large power systems, was supervised by Mani V. Venkatasubramanian. [3] She also has an Master of Business Administration from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington. [2]
From 2001 to 2002 worked for GridSouth TransCo, [2] a regional power transmission company formed in 2000 by combining assets from three smaller companies in North and South Carolina. GridSouth failed in 2002, [4] and she moved to the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). [2] After over 20 years at MISO, she moved to her present position at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. [1]
Chen received the Franz Edelman Award of INFORMS in 2011 for her work on optimization in market design at MISO. [5] She was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2023, "for contributions in wholesale electricity market design and operations". [6]