Biography

Dr. Hidalgo-Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego. She is the director of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics (REAM) lab at UCSD. She holds a Ph.D. and two M.Sc. from the University of California, Berkeley in Energy and Resources and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. She graduated as an Industrial and Electrical engineer from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her work has been funded by the California Energy Commission, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Sloan Foundation, the Environmental Defense Fund, the University of California Office of the President and GridLab (totaling $5.3M, where $2.1M are as lead PI). Prof. Hidalgo-Gonzalez is the 2025 IISE Energy Systems Division Outstanding Young Investigator Awardee (one winner per year globally), an NSF GRFP fellow, Siebel Scholar in Energy, Rising Star in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award at UC Berkeley (for teaching Convex Optimization), has been awarded Best paper at the Power Systems Computation Conference 2020, and is part of the Editors’ Highlights in Nature Communications (best 50 papers recently published in “Engineering and Infrastructure”), her work was cited in The White House 2024 Economic Report of the President, among other recognitions. She is part of the IEEE Task forces “Data-driven controls for distributed systems” and “Wildfire Aware-Risk Management (WARM) for the Electric Power Grid” and has served as best paper judge in the IEEE Control Systems Society Technical Committee on Energy Systems. She has also served as the opening talk for the energy storage session in EPRI’s 43rd Seminar on Resource Planning in Washington D.C., and as a speaker at a symposium from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in Halle, Germany, among others.

Research interest

Professor Hidalgo-Gonzalez’s work focuses on high penetration of renewable energy using optimization, control theory and machine learning. She co-developed the first stochastic power system expansion model to study the Western North America’s grid under climate change uncertainty. She also works on power dynamics with low and variable inertia, and controller design using machine learning and safety guarantees. She is generally interested in power dynamics, energy policy, electricity market redesign for the integration of renewable energy, microgrids, transmission and distribution systems, and learning for dynamical systems with safety guarantees. Professor Hidalgo-Gonzalez enjoys teaching convex optimization, control theory and power systems. Email: phidalgogonzalez at ucsd.edu

Awards and recognitions

  • 2025 Outstanding Young Investigator Award, Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Energy Systems Division
  • 2024 Nature Communications Editors’ Highlights. 50 best papers recently published in ‘‘Engineering and Infrastructure’’
  • Cited by The White House 2024 Economic Report of the President
  • Power Systems Computation Conference 2020 Highlights Award, top 3% of papers
  • 2019 - 2020 Siebel Scholar in Energy Science
  • 2019 Rising Stars in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
  • 2019 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor at UC Berkeley
  • 2015 U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program
  • 2014 Graduate Opportunity Program Award at UC Berkeley

Outreach

Professor Hidalgo-Gonzalez believes the world can be a better place if we:

  • Make engineering accessible to everyone, especially if they lack access and support
  • Make education accessible for all
  • Mentor talented students from all over the world
  • Mitigate climate change
  • Have mostly plant-based diets (to the extent possible for each person)
  • Are generally kind :)