The CAREER award is NSF’s most prestigious award in “support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.”

Molzahn’s NSF CAREER project, "Overcoming Nonlinearities, Uncertainties, and Discreteness to Mitigate the Impacts of Extreme Events on Electric Power Systems,” aims to develop fundamental theory and algorithms for addressing the heavily stressed conditions inherent to power systems during extreme events such as wildfires, hurricanes, evacuations, etc.

The educational and outreach efforts in this project involve the Georgia Tech Vertically Integrated Projects team “Gaming for Electric Power Grids" comprised of undergraduate students who are creating video games that task players with operating power grids during extreme events. In the spirit of citizen science, the players' solutions to the video game simulations will form a crowdsourced dataset that will be used to train the machine learning models in the project's research efforts, closing the loop between research and education.

Molzahn joined the faculty of ECE in Spring 2019. Prior to this position, he was a computational engineer at Argonne National Laboratory in the Center for Energy, Environmental, and Economic Systems Analysis (CEEESA), where he currently holds an affiliate position. He was a Dow Postdoctoral Fellow in Sustainability in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and the Master’s of Public Affairs degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.