Biography

Dr. Hidalgo-Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego. 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 of Chile. She is an NSF GRFP fellow, Siebel Scholar in Energy, Rising Star in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and has been awarded the UC Berkeley Graduate Opportunity Program Award, and the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award (for teaching Convex Optimization). She has served as Best Paper Session Judge and co-Chair, and Paper Forum Chair at the 2019 and 2020 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM). She is one of the academic co-leads of the IEEE Power & Energy Society Task Force “Data-Driven Controls for Distributed Systems”. She is the director of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics (REAM) lab at UCSD.

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 eng.ucsd.edu

Outreach

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

  • Make engineering accessible for girls, young women, BIPOC, LGBT members and other minorities
  • 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 :)