Biographies

Vahid Madani - IEEE Fellow, is the primary architect and developer of standards in protection & control integration applications and substation modernization at Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E).  He is a Tau Beta Pi member, and a registered Electrical Engineer with more than 25 years of academic and utility experience, and recipient of many honorary and distinguished citations. For a decade, he served as Chair of the WECC RAS Reliability Subcommittee and received the best Chair Person award for his leadership twice. He Chairs the Performance Standards Task Team within the North American Synchrophasor Initiative (NASPI).

Mr. Madani is the author of more than 60 publications, the co-editor of the 2006 McGraw Hill year book of science technology, and the 2008 Edition of International Journal of Reliability and Safety (IJRS) for InderScience Publishing.

Jonathan Sykes  is Manager of System Protection at PG & E in Oakland California. He graduated in 1982 and is a Licensed electrical engineer.  He is active on several committees in the Western Electric Coordinating Council and is Vice Chairman of the N. American Electric Reliability Corporation System Protection and Control Subcommittee.  Jonathan is a member of IEEE, and in  is active in NERC and WECC standards development.

He has established standards in EHV relaying and SPS/RAS design and implementation, and is a subject matter expert in the interpretation of various critical infrastructure related standards.

Mark Adamiak received his BS and ME degrees from Cornell University and MS-EE from the Polytechnic Institute of New York. He is the Director of Advanced Technologies with GE's Digital Energy protection and control business and is responsible for identifying and developing new technologies.  Mark joined GE after 15 years with American Electric Power (AEP) where he worked on basic R&D in digital relaying including Synchrophasors.  Mark is an IEEE Fellow, an active member of the PSR committee, an IEC61850 WG member, and a regular member to CIGRE.