Dr. Saifur Rahman is the Joseph R. Loring professor of electrical and computer engineering and the founding director of the Advanced Research Institute at Virginia Tech. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a PES Distinguished Lecturer. He served for three years as a program director in the Engineering Directorate at the US National Science Foundation. He was a research scientist at the Tokyo Electric Power Company, Japan for one year. He has also worked for Progress Energy in North Carolina and the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. He has consulted for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the United Nations Development Program. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech.