Mostafa Farrokhabadi

Assistant Professor
ESE Department
University of Calgary

I hold a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. During my Ph.D., I also worked for the Canadian Solar and Hatch Ltd. I joined BluWave-ai in May 2018 as the first employee and technical leader, scaling up the company's technology stack to Series A. In July 2022, I joined the Department of Electrical and Software Engineering at the University of Calgary. I am a Senior Member of IEEE, an Ontario Professional Engineer (P.Eng.), and a Senior Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, among several other professional and service appointments.

I am the PI of the Distribution Grids Research & Innovation (DGRI) Lab. The moniker "DGRI" is pronounced similarly to "degree," signifying the group's commitment to climate change mitigation. The name also serves as a tribute to its location, aligning phonetically with "Calgary.”

Research

My research covers the broad areas of modeling, stability, control, and optimization in power systems. More recently, I have been focused on modern electrical distribution grids and microgrids. I use tools from power systems engineering, control, optimization, and applied machine learning. For more information about my active areas of research, please visit the page for Distribution Grids Research & Innovation (DGRI) Lab.

Publications

Please refer to my Google Scholar. My publications are also listed in my CV (updated November 2025).

News

12/2025: Presented at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning.
12/2025: PMAPS 2026 Call for Participation is out; consider submitting your best work.
11/2025: Delivered an invited talk on marginal utility of complexity in grid-edge applications at UCalgary Math CS Climate Day.
10/2025: Presented two papers and delivered a workshop on ML applications to power systems at the IEEE EPEC 2025.
10/2025: Delivered invited talk on ML applications to power systesm at Carleton University Department of Electronics.
09/2025: Presented about online convex learnign for energy arbitrage as an invited panelist at the IEEE SmartGridComm 2025.
08/2025: Led the development of the NSF WIRED Global Center Data Hub.
08/2025: Appointed as the Senior Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid.
07/2025: Punsara Samrakkody, DGRI Lab's MSc graduate student, defended her thesis on "Exploring Simplicity Limits in Electrical Distribution Systems Modeling for Voltage Sensitivity Estimation".
05/2025: Inaugurating the new course, "Machine Learning for Electrical Energy Systems" in the ESE Department (W2026).
02/2025: Received the Schulich School of Engineering Early Career Research Excellence Award.
12/2024: Presented at the NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning.
05/2024: Delivered the keynote of "AI in Energy and Environment" theme at Amii Upper Bound 2024.
11/2023: Selected among the University of Calgary's Delegates to the formal section of the UNFCCC COP28.
04/2023: Participated in the CIFAR AI for Energy & Environment Symposium.
03/2023: Received the ESE Department Annual Teaching Excellence Award from the UofC Engineering Students’ Society.
02/2021: Selected by the Royal Society of Canada to be among the 21 early-career Canadian scientists attending the Commonwealth Science Conference 2021.