Dr. Raheel Zafar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at LUMS. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Power Systems in 2019 from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. He obtained his B.Sc. (2009) and M.Sc. (2011) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Lahore. He has worked as a Lecturer at UET Lahore for one and a half years. He has also served as an Assistant Professor at GIK Institute. He has worked at NESCOM and NTDC for four years.      

His research focuses mainly on the technical challenges involved in the integration of renewable energy sources into distribution grids. He has developed a multi-timescale volt/VAR optimization framework to coordinate slow-acting traditional control equipment with fast-acting smart inverters. He has considered battery energy storage system to effectively integrate renewable energy sources in power grids under forecasting uncertainties. He has developed convex relaxation models to achieve the global optima of several concrete research problems. His research has resulted in several publications in reputable journals and conferences including IEEE Transactions, Elsevier, and IEEE PES conferences.

Research Interests

• Power system operation and control

• Convex relaxations in power system optimization

• Smart distribution grids/Microgrids

• System analysis for utility-scale renewable integration using battery energy storage

• Metaheuristic optimization algorithms

• Power system voltage stability