Dirk Lauinger

I am a postdoc at the MIT Energy Initiative and the Sloan School of Management researching mathematical optimization for electricity storage and transportation.

I joined Sungho Shin's group in September 2024 to work on storage investment problems, after a two year postdoc with Andy Sun working on storage operations and on ARPA-E's Grid Optimization Competition.

In June 2022, I completed my PhD in the Risk Analytics and Optimization Lab at EPFL. My thesis focused on robust optimization for vehicle-to-grid and was advised by Daniel Kuhn and François Vuille.

I hold a MSc in Energy Management and Sustainability and a BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from EPFL.

I research mathematical optimization techniques for the planning and operation of sustainable and reliable energy and mobility systems. My research philosophy is to first define relevant real-world problems, ideally in collaboration with concerned stakeholders, and then develop analytical tools to address them. These tools typically employ optimization under uncertainty, large-scale optimization, and material and energy flow analysis. I am particularly interested in translating policy into math for decision-making problems.

News:

May 25: Our preprint "Alternating methods for large-scale AC optimal power flow with unit commitment" is available on arXiv and Optimization Online.

Oct 24: I chair a session on electricity storage at INFORMS and present on "Arbitrage and Regulation with Electricity Storage".

May 24: Our paper "On the potential of vehicle-to-grid and second-life batteries to provide energy and material security" is published in Nature Communications.