Jonathan White is the director of NREL's Cybersecurity Program Office. In this role, White coordinates NREL's cybersecurity research portfolio and provides strategic guidance for the growth of staffing, capabilities, and facilities. He oversees programmatic relationships with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, and the private sector. He also serves as laboratory program manager to the DOE Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response.
Previously, White managed NREL's Secure Cyber-Energy Systems group within the Energy Security and Resilience Center, where he led a team of researchers and analysts who specialize in cybersecurity vulnerability analysis, encryption technologies for distributed energy resources, and advanced modeling, emulation, and visualization tools to evaluate the security of power-communications networks. The focus of NREL's cybersecurity research is centered on intrinsic security design principles for bulk power renewables, distributed energy resources, and next-generation grid control systems. Prior to joining NREL, White spent over a decade performing research in wind turbine physical damage monitoring and wind plant control systems at Sandia National Laboratories. He was the lead engineer for DOE's first research multi-turbine wind plant, the Scaled Wind Farm Technology Facility (SWiFT), where he was involved with projects on wind blade validation, data analysis, wind plant control, and wind plant reliability. During this time, White led a joint Sandia-NREL effort to forensically identify natural and cyber-physical vulnerabilities after a wind turbine catastrophically failed at the facility. The effort led to an extensive cyber-physical assessment and consequence-driven mitigation study by DOE's Wind Energy Technologies Office on wind energy systems.
Research Interests
Energy control systems cybersecurity
Cyber resilience of autonomous systems
Complex system of systems security
Hazard evaluation and failure analysis
Structural health monitoring
Theoretical and experimental structural dynamics
Control systems
Education
Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University
M.S., Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University
B.S., Mechanical Engineering, The Ohio State University