Professor Jorge E. González-Cruz/Bio
SUNY Empire Innovation Professor
University at Albany, NY
Email: jgonzalez-cruz@albany.edu
Web: http://cuerg.asrc.albany.edu
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorgegonzalez5/
Prof. González-Cruz is the SUNY Empire Innovation Professor at the University of Albany of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, and lead scientist of the Coastal-Urban Environmental Research Group (CUERG). Prof. González-Cruz earned his Doctorate (1994) and Bachelor (1988) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, respectively. He teaches and conducts research in urban energy sustainability and resiliency, urban weather and climate, and regional climate modeling and analysis. Professor González-Cruz holds several patents in solar energy equipment, solar desalination systems, bio-aerosol detection, advanced heat pumps systems, and energy forecasting for buildings, and was recognized as a prominent young researcher by the National Science Foundation with a prestigious CAREER Award. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, has delivered 100s of conference presentations, and his research has attracted more than $50M in external funding. He is a Fellow Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), and Former Vice-Chairman of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Board on the Urban Environment. He is the 2025 recipient of the AMS Helmut E. Landsberg Award for Outstanding Contributions to Urban Climate. He was appointed in 2015 by the Mayor of the City as Member of the Climate Change Panel for City of New York, and more recently named Senior Scientist of Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is the co-editor of the ASME Handbook of Integrated and Sustainable Buildings Equipment and Systems, and was named in 2019 as the Founding Editor of the ASME Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities.
An Integrated Approach for Future Resiliently-Smart Power Transmission Systems of Islanded Communities
Jorge E. Gonzalez-Cruz
SUNY Empire Innovation Professor
University at Albany, Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, Albany, NY 12222
The recurrence of extreme weather events has elevated the need for the development of methods for assessing the vulnerability and interdependencies of physical and human systems. A learning case is Hurricane Maria (H-Maria), where Puerto Rico experienced damage to 80% of its electrical power system, leading to massive disruptions of essential services for months. This work develops physics and machine learning (ML) based methods to evaluate the effectiveness of various interventions aimed at reducing vulnerability by considering power and water infrastructure and respective water-power dependencies taking into account the social vulnerability of affected communities associated with the physical infrastructure upgrades. The work recreates H-Maria using high-resolution modeling and evaluates vulnerability and increased resiliency of the power and water grids with ML approaches. Considering the current infrastructure configuration, all communities suffered enormously from power and water outages. As one resilience upgrade option, incorporating regional energy grids would reduce outages in an H-Maria scenario; we show that a large portion of disadvantaged communities will face service disruption under this option. In contrast, hardening transmission lines, as the second option, would improve service delivery and, most importantly, provide uninterrupted service to the higher portion of the vulnerable population. The methods and approaches developed are transferable to Islanded communities elsewhere exposed to extreme weather events.