Ana K. Rivera received her bachelor’s degree in electromechanical engineering from the Technological University of Panama (UTP). Before joining MIT as a PhD student, she worked as a lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering at UTP and as a research assistant with the Research Group on Energy and Comfort in Bioclimatic Buildings. Her research focuses on optimization in power systems operations and planning, including unit commitment and transmission expansion planning, as well as related work on power flow and machine learning methods for these problems.