Updated: May 2024

Gianni Celli was born in Cagliari, Italy, in 1969. In 1994, he graduated in Electrical Engineering at the University of Cagliari, where he is an Associate Professor of Power Systems from 2018 at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He has and had the direction and/or management of several Italian and international research projects. He published over 160 papers in high-ranking international journals and conference proceedings, with a SCOPUS h-index of 27 and 3475 citations.

Since 1997, he lectured several courses of the Power System scientific area within the bachelor and master’s degree in Electrical Engineering. Currently, he holds the courses of “Power Systems Analysis and Control” and “Power Systems Dynamics and Stability”. Moreover, he gave some tutorials and invited speeches in international conferences (CIRED, IEEE General Meeting, India Smart Grid Week) on topics about traditional and innovative planning of MV and LV electric distribution networks.

Inside the University of Cagliari, since JULY 2021 he holds the institutional roles of Coordinator of the Electrical Engineering master's degree, where he was the reference person for the quality assurance from 2016 to 2021. He is also member of the Industrial Engineering PhD board, and member of the Library Council of the Technological District.

He has been co-chair of the Task Force on “Methods for Active Network Planning” within the CIGRE WG C6.19 on Planning and Optimization Methods for Active Distribution Systems, and he is currently member of the CIGRE WG C6/C2.34 on Flexibility provision from DER.

He is editorial board member of the Energies journal, for which he has been also co-editor of a special issue on Distribution System Optimization. He has been reviewer of projects presented in the European funding program ERA-Net Smart Grids Plus. Moreover, he has been external examiner of master theses for students of Universities of Cape Town and Melbourne.

He received the IEEE Outstanding Paper Award for the paper: Celli G., Costamagna E., Fanni A., “Genetic Algorithms for Telecommunications Network Optimization”, in Proc. of IEEE international conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Vancouver (Canada), October 1995.

His main research activity is in the field of planning and operation of electric distribution systems in presence of a large diffusion of Distributed Generation, including all the topics on the exploitation of the available flexibility from Distributed Energy Resources (renewable generation, demand response, electric vehicles, electric storage devices). Particular attention is paid also on the topic of reliability and resilience assessment of electric distribution networks with active management, taking into account the impact of ICT infrastructures on the Power System performances by using pseudo-sequential Monte Carlo simulations and co-simulation tools. These researches have, also, increased his skill on the development and application of advanced optimization techniques in the power systems field, like meta-heuristic and evolutionary algorithms, Multi-Objective programming, probabilistic methods and decision theory.

Finally, he is co-founder of the university spin-off RESPECT s.r.l. (Renewable Energy Smart Power and Clean Technology). Among its activities, he has been consultant for the risk assessment against lightning on historical buildings and scientific expert, with also on field missions, in international contracts between CESI and Jordan distribution utilities (for the development of a common methodology for technical and non-technical losses estimation) and between CESI and the electrical utility of Uzbekistan (for the definition of general criteria for the electric distribution network modernization).