Rate My Professor Alessandra Parisio

Alessandra Parisio is the Professor of Control of Sustainable Energy Networks in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Manchester. She also holds the position of Discipline Head of Education in the same department. Parisio earned her PhD in Automatic Control from the University of Sannio in Italy in 2010.

Her primary research interests lie in control engineering, with a focus on model predictive control, distributed optimisation and control, stochastic constrained control, and their applications to power systems. She specializes in energy management under uncertainty, optimisation and control of multi-energy networks and distributed flexibility, building climate control, and the design of advanced control frameworks for flexibility in urban districts and energy networks to accommodate high shares of renewable energy sources. Her work incorporates data-based methods, probabilistic and physics-informed machine learning techniques for scalable decision-making in multi-energy systems.

Parisio has received major awards including the IEEE PES Outstanding Engineer Award in January 2021 and the Energy and Buildings Best Paper Award for the ten-year period 2008-2017 in January 2019. She is an IEEE Senior Member since 2018. In terms of service, she is Editor for IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, European Journal of Control, and Applied Energy, and Guest Editor for IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion. She co-chairs the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Smart Buildings, serves as Vice-Chair for Education of the IFAC Technical Committee 9.3 Control for Smart Cities, and is a member of the Higher Education Academy and the European Control Association Conference Editorial Board.

Her research impact is evidenced by over 7,400 citations on Google Scholar and 87 research outputs, including 46 journal articles. Key publications include: Beus et al., "A Model Predictive Control Approach to Operation Optimization of an Ultracapacitor Bank for Frequency Control," IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion (2021); Bolzoni et al., "Model Predictive Control for optimizing the flexibility of sustainable energy assets: An experimental case study," International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems (2021); Zhao et al., "Distributed Control of Battery Energy Storage Systems for Improved Frequency Regulation," IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (2020). She has delivered keynote speeches and invited talks on topics like optimal coordination of distributed energy storage systems. Additionally, she leads a work package on Digitalisation in the Supergen Energy Networks Hub.