Richard Macwan is a senior researcher with the Energy Security and Resilience Center. His work is focused on cyber-physical systems security of electric grids and smart grid technologies, providing expertise at the intersection of cybersecurity and power systems. Macwan's primary research interests include the development of physics-based algorithms and technologies for increasing the cyber resilience of power grids, as well as the development of realistic cyber-physical test bed environments for the assessment of such technologies. Prior to NREL, Macwan was a senior research engineer at the Information Trust Institute, where he led research efforts on projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy that aimed to detect and mitigate the potential impact of cyber-related threats to power grids. Additionally, Macwan served as the lead power research engineer for the Cyber-Physical Experimentation Environment for a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program that aimed to enable blackstart recovery of the power grid from a national scale cyberattack on the U.S. energy sector's critical infrastructure. Macwan has been involved in a wide range of research efforts in power systems—from analyzing the impact of geo-magnetic disturbance to the generation of synthetic power grid models for research and experimentation.

Research Interests

Physics-based algorithms and technologies for cyber resilience of power grids

Cyber-physical test bed environments

Education

M.S., Electrical Engineering, Polytechnic Institute of New York University

B.S., Electrical Engineering, Gujarat University

Professional Experience

Senior research engineer – power, Information Trust Institute, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (2013–2020)

Research assistant, Polytechnic Institute of New York University (2011–2012)

Assistant manager of electrical engineering, Essar Engineering Services Ltd. (2008–2009)

Featured Work

Improving Grid Resilience Using High-Voltage dc: Strengthening the Security of Power System Stability, IEEE Power and Energy Magazine (2019)

Coordination of DERs in Microgrids with Cybersecure Resilient Decentralized Secondary Frequency Control, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2017)

Anomaly Detection in Electrical Substation Circuits via Unsupervised Machine Learning, IEEE 17th International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, (2016)

Collaborative Defense against Data Injection Attack in IEC61850-Based Smart Substations, 2016 IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting (2016)

Energy and Economic Impacts of the Application of CVR in Heavily Meshed Secondary Distribution Networks, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery (2014)

Field-Validated Load Model for the Analysis of CVR in Distribution Secondary Networks: Energy Conservation, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery (2013)

Cyber-Attacks on Primary Frequency Response Mechanisms in Power Grids, Computer Magazine (submitted)

Fast, Approximate State Estimation-Based Approach for Cyber Threat Detection in Power Systems, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2020 (submitted)