Varun Badrinath Krishna

Varun Badrinath Krishna is a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department and a research assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is advised by Prof. William H. Sanders, and is researching data-driven methods to improve energy resource utilization, data integrity, and cyber-resilience in modern power grids. His work has won best paper awards at QEST 2015 and CRITIS 2015, a seed-funding award from the Siebel Energy Institute in 2015, the Rambus Computer Engineering Fellowship in 2017, and an ECE Alumni Endowment Fellowship in 2018.

Varun received a B. Eng. from the National University of Singapore in 2010 and a M.S. from UIUC in 2016. Between those degrees, he worked as a research engineer for three years in Singapore. While in graduate school, he completed summer internships in the U.S. at ABB Corporate Research Center in 2015, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in 2016, Cisco Systems Inc. in 2017, and C3IoT in 2018. His work at IBM Research led to two U.S. patent applications on which he is the primary inventor. Varun was inducted into the Siebel Scholars Class of 2018 for academic, research, and leadership excellence in energy sciences.