Building the decision infrastructure for the AI-era grid
I am a final-year Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering at Harvard University, working with Professor Le Xie. My research combines optimization, probabilistic simulation, and agentic AI to advance power-system planning, operations, and electricity markets. I develop computational methods that accelerate reliability evaluation and capacity accreditation at scale, assess and price operational flexibility, and enable verifiable AI workflows for power-system engineering. This work is organized into three research thrusts: Differentiable Reliability, Deliverable Flexibility, and Deployable Agentic Intelligence.
My internships at ISO New England, The Brattle Group and Alibaba Cloud, together with research collaborations with MISO and ERCOT, have inspired many of my research questions and shaped my focus on practical challenges faced by power engineers and industry practitioners. I am also the founder of the PowerAgent community, which brings together global researchers and engineers to advance agentic AI for power grids.
Before joining Harvard, I spent two wonderful years at Texas A&M University, which helped shape my engineering mindset. I received my master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Zhejiang University in China.
I am on the academic job market for positions beginning in 2027. I would be glad to talk — qianzhang@g.harvard.edu.
Live demos
Recent
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Oct 2026 | Building the Decision Infrastructure for the AI-Era Grid Invited poster, Integration of Artificial Intelligence in the Electricity System Workshop, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Washington, DC. |
| Oct 2026 | PowerAgentBench: Benchmarking Agentic AI in Power System Steady-State and Dynamic Studies Presentation, 2026 North American Power Symposium, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI. |
| Oct 2026 | Power System Simulation with Agentic AI: Software Automation and Behavioral Modeling Guest lecture, ES 215: Physical and Economical Operations of Sustainable Energy Systems, Harvard University. |
| Sep 2026 | Building the Decision Infrastructure for the AI-Era Grid Poster, Sustainable Compute & AI Infrastructure (SCAI) Research Symposium, UMass Amherst. |
| Jun 2026 | Comparative Assessment of Look-Ahead Economic Dispatch and Ramp Products for Grid Flexibility Oral presentation, 24th Power Systems Computation Conference, Limassol, Cyprus. |
| Jun 2026 | From ELCC to MRI: A Gradient-Based View of Capacity Accreditation and the Challenge of Energy Storage Invited talk, EPRI ISO/RTO Working Group Meeting on Capacity Accreditation Methods. |
| Jun 2026 | From AI Agents to Market Agents: Rethinking Power System Operations, Planning, and Electricity Markets Invited talk, Appian Way Energy Partners, Cambridge, MA. |
| May 2026 | Data Infrastructure Sharing, Access, and Requirements in the Era of Agentic AI Invited talk and panelist, Control Room of the Future Testbed (CROFT) Workshop, U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity. |
| Mar–May 2026 | PowerAgent: A Roadmap Toward Agentic Intelligence in Power Systems Posters at CERAWeek by S&P Global, Houston (Mar); the IEEE PES Transmission & Distribution Conference and Exposition, Chicago (May); and the Harvard Power and AI Initiative Research Summit (May). |
| Mar 2026 | Plug-and-Play: Connect PowerMCP and PowerSkills to Your LLM Tutorial, 5th Workshop on Foundation Models of the Electric Grid, Harvard University, Allston, MA. |
| Feb 2026 | Opportunities and Challenges of Agentic AI in Power Systems Guest lecture, ECE 285: Agentic AI and LLMs for Smart Grids, University of California San Diego. |
| Dec 2025 | A Roadmap Toward Agentic Intelligence in Power Systems Invited talk, ERCOT Board of Directors, Technology and Security Committee (with L. Xie); and ERCOT staff meeting, Austin, TX. |