Two engineers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been elevated to senior membership in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Researchers receiving the honor include Bryan Maldonado in the Building Envelope Materials Research Group and Jin Dong in the Interactive Controls Group.
This highest level of IEEE membership, awarded by peers for technical and professional excellence, is reserved for only the roughly 10% of the organization’s 450,000 members who have made the most significant contributions to the engineering field over time.
Maldonado is a researcher in the Buildings and Transportation Science Division who joined ORNL in 2020. His current research focuses on automating building construction including the integration of artificial intelligence-based control, optimization methods and robotics for envelope retrofitting. He has also applied his expertise in statistical machine learning, stochastic dynamic programming, control theory and model-based optimal control in the transportation sector to investigate fuel performance in combustion engines. His cross-cutting research utilizes the capabilities of several DOE national user facilities at ORNL, including the Building Technologies Research and Integration Center and the National Transportation Research Center.
Jin Dong is a researcher in the Electrification and Energy Infrastructures Division who joined ORNL in 2016. His research focuses on power and energy system modeling and control, with expertise in optimization and machine learning for distribution grids. At ORNL, he leads multiple projects advancing grid-edge optimization and control algorithms to improve grid flexibility, reliability and resilience. His contributions have been recognized with two best paper awards from the 2024 and 2025 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting and one from the 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science .