Jul 24: Shashaani and collaborators, Rachunok and Kern are the winners of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE) Phase 1 Track 1 of the Digitizing Utilities Prize. The project is about providing estimates of likely future severe weather outages with sufficient lead time to make timely staffing and crew dispatching decisions, partnering with North Carolina’s Electric Cooperatives (NCEC), which has identified winter ice storms and summer thunderstorms, tropical storms, and lower-intensity hurricanes as among their most difficult-to-staff challenges.