Cong Chen

Overview

Cong Chen is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College. She was selected as a Stanford Energy Fellow in 2024. Her research aims to drive the global energy transition through principled engineering solutions rooted in optimization, economics, and modern machine learning/AI. In particular, she has research experience in large-scale distributed energy resource aggregation, pricing under uncertainties, energy storage integration in the electricity market, large language models for energy consumers, and hydrogen storage for grid resilience. She was an intern at ISO New England, and has received multiple honors, including the IEEE PES Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for her outstanding contributions to IEEE PES in advancing power system and electricity market operations with high penetration of storage and renewable energy.

Research Interests

Power systems engineering; optimization theory; power systems economics; and electricity markets

Education

BE, Electrical Engineering, Wuhan University
MS, Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University
PhD, Electrical Engineering (major); Operations Research and Data Science (minor), Cornell University

Awards

Amazon Research Award, 2026
IEEE PES Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2025
Best Presentation Award, PhD Dissertation Challenge, IEEE PES Grid Edge Technologies Conference & Exposition, 2025
Best Paper Award, IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM), 2025 & 2024 & 2019
Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2024
Cornell ECE Outstanding PhD Thesis Award, 2024
Prize Conference Paper Award, IEEE PESGM, 2023
Engineering and Applied Science Trailblazing Young Researcher, Caltech, 2023
Irwin and Joan Jacobs Scholar, Cornell University, 2019
Outstanding Graduate Student & Thesis Award, Tsinghua University, 2019
Outstanding Undergraduate Student & Thesis Award, Wuhan University, 2017

Professional Activities

Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Power Systems; IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid; IEEE Transactions on Energy Markets, Policy, and Regulation; IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering; IEEE Power Engineering Letters; IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy; Electric Power Systems Research; Elsevier Journal on Applied Energy; IET Renewable Power Generation; IET Smart Grid; CSEE Journal of Power and Energy Systems; IEEE Power and Energy Technology Systems Journal
Conference Reviewer: Power Systems Computation Conference (PSCC); IEEE Power Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM); IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC); Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS); IEEE Conference on Energy Internet and Energy System Integration (EI2); IEEE Texas Power and Energy Conference (TPEC)
Conference Panel Co-Host: IEEE PES Grid Edge Technologies Conference & Exposition
Member, IEEE Power System Operation, Planning & Economics (PSOPE) Subcommittee (2023 – present)
Mentor, Athena Talaria Research (Jul. 2021 – Aug. 2021)
Buddy, Expanding Your Horizons, Cornell University (2022, 2023 & 2024)
Chairwoman, Enactus, Wuhan University (May 2015 – May 2016): Led a team of 70+ members running 6 welfare entrepreneurship projects. Won the 2016 Golden Prize in the "Chuang Qing Chun" Entrepreneurship project competition (the most influential Entrepreneurship project competition in China)

Selected Publications

J. Liu, C. Chen, X. Ai, J. Fang, J. Wang, and J. Wen, "Mean-Field Learning for Storage Aggregation," arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.21039, 2026. (under review)
S. Li, J. Kim, and C. Chen, "Behavioral Generative Agents for Power Dispatch and Auctions," arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.08477, 2026 (under review)
C. Chen, O. Karaduman, and X. Kuang, "Behavioral Generative Agents for Energy Operations," arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.12664, 2025. (under review)
C. Chen, S.Li, and L. Tong, "Multi-Interval Energy-Reserve Co-Optimization with SoC-Dependent Bids from Battery Storage," IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 3008-3016, July 2025.
C. Chen, A. Alahmed, T. Mount, and L. Tong, "Wholesale Market Participation of DERA: Competitive DER Aggregation," arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.02004, 2024 (under review)
C. Chen, S. Bose, T. Mount, and L. Tong, "Wholesale Market Participation of DERA: DSO-DERA-ISO Coordination," IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 2024.
C. Chen, and L. Tong, "Convexifying Market Clearing of SoC-Dependent Bids From Merchant Storage Participants," IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 2955–2957, 2023.
C. Chen, and L. Tong, "Pricing Real-Time Stochastic Storage Operations," Electric Power Systems Research, vol. 212, pp. 108606, 2022.
Y. Guo, C. Chen, and L. Tong, "Pricing Multi-Interval Dispatch under Uncertainty Part I: Dispatch-Following Incentives," IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 3865–3877, 2021.
C. Chen, Y. Guo, and L. Tong, "Pricing Multi-Interval Dispatch under Uncertainty Part II: Generalization and Performance," IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 3878–3886, 2021.
C. Chen, H. Sun, X. Shen, Y. Guo, Q. Guo, and T. Xia, "Two-Stage Robust Planning-Operation Co-Optimization of Energy Hub," Applied Energy, vol. 252, no. 113372, 2019.