Nader Samaan is a chief power systems research engineer and a team lead for the Grid Analytics team within the Electricity Infrastructure Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). He has been performing research in the areas of renewables integration, transmission planning, production cost modeling, and cascading outage analysis at PNNL since 2009. He is PI/PM for SuNLaMP project developing planning and operational tools to enable high penetration of distributed PV through the optimization of sub-transmission voltage regulation. He is the PI for the Dynamic Contingency Analysis Tool (DCAT) that introduces a hybrid steady-state and dynamic analysis approach for cascading outage analysis. DCAT has been selected for the prestigious 2018 R&D 100 Awards.

He was PNNL technical lead for several studies that investigate the impact of high distributed PV penetration on the Duke Energy Carolinas and Florida systems. He was the PI/PM for NWPP EIM benefits analysis study. He has been the PI/PM for the WECC VGS balancing authorities cooperation study. He was involved in several other projects such as, developing an approach for predicting regulation reserve requirements for CAISO in the day-ahead time frame.