Alfonso Valdes

Education

• M.S., Operations Research, Stanford University

Biography

Alfonso Valdes is a Principal Research Scientist with the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois, responsible for a portfolio of diverse research activities, including the Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium (CREDC); and previously the Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid project (TCIPG), and the Illinois Center for a Smarter Electric Grid (ICSEG). In this role he is responsible for strategic direction of the various smart grid initiatives at the university, including interaction with utility and industry stakeholders.

Mr. Valdes is the Illinois lead on industry-academic partnerships studying secure inter-operability of electric microgrid assets as well as high-voltage direct current (HVDC) interconnects, and successfully led a previous partnership developing security solutions in time-critical distributed substation protection systems. His research interest focuses on security and resiliency of infrastructure systems, particularly innovative techniques for intrusion detection, as well as security implications of renewable energy integration and smart grid mechanisms.

Mr. Valdes regularly participates in infrastructure security roadmapping efforts at the invitation of the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Mr. Valdes is active in international collaborations, with KTH (Swedish Royal Institute of Technology) through the University of Illinois INSPIRE program, NWO (Netherlands equivalent of the NSF), and the European Union (as external advisor to the SUCCESS and previously CRISALIS project securing critical infrastructures).

Mr. Valdes has given invited talks to the CRITIS conference (Lillehammer, Norway), Great Lakes Smart Energy Symposium and the Midwest Energy Forum (Chicago), and the Design Automation Conference workshop on embedded systems security (Austin, Tx.). He was co-organizer of two Dagstuhl (Germany) workshops on critical infrastructure security.

Mr. Valdes was formerly a Senior Computer Scientist in the Computer Sciences Laboratory at SRI International, where he led several projects in information security for clients such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. His later research at SRI focused on security of critical infrastructure systems in the Oil and Gas and Electric Sectors He is co-inventor on two patents in cyber-security.

Mr. Valdes holds an AB (Mathematics) from the University of California, Berkeley and a MS (Operations Research) from Stanford University.