Shay Bahramirad

Vice President of Transmission and Distribution Engineering, Pacific Gas & Electric Company

Dr. Shay Bahramirad is the Vice President of Transmission and Distribution Engineering at Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PGE). 

Prior to joining PGE, she was the Senior Vice President of T&D, Strategy, and Sustainability at LUMA Energy, the power company responsible for electric service in Puerto Rico. In this role, she served as the chief architect of the energy transformation in Puerto Rico, responsible for the oversight, planning, and execution of plans to modernize the power infrastructure and improve reliability and resiliency. This includes a foundation of developing local talent, teams, and processes, and the prudent deployment of new technologies.

Dr. Bahramirad has held several positions in the sector including Vice President of Climate and Resilience at Quanta Technology, where she was responsible for assisting cities and utilities with climate change risk assessments for their assets, operations, and services and for developing investment strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Before that, she was Vice President of Engineering and Smart Grid at ComEd, the electric utility serving Chicago and Northern Illinois, where she had led efforts to demonstrate and deploy technologies to ensure that the distribution system would meet strategic goals related to reliability, resiliency and sustainability while developing and implementing a broader community of the future vision including a focus on industry-informed STEM education for underrepresented communities in the industry including girls. She has been an expert witness testifying in US Congress and several state and commonwealth regulatory agencies regarding disaster recovery, reconstruction of power grids, microgrids, energy storage, investment strategies, and the interconnection of distributed energy resources.

Dr. Bahramirad is a leading figure in the industry. She is the President of the IEEE Power and Energy Society, an editorial board member of the Electricity Journal, a US CIGRE Executive member, an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, a board member of Mercy Home for Boys and Girls and the founder of IEEE Women in Power.

Dr. Bahramirad completed her PhD in electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology and has published more than 100 academic articles, as well as being the recipient of multiple US patents.