OPTIMA Associate Investigator Maria Vrakopoulou is a Lecturer in the Power and Energy System group at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne. She received her diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece in May 2008, and her PhD degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, at ETH Zurich, Switzerland in June 2014. Dr. Vrakopoulou pursued her research as a post-doc in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA for a year, and then she earned a 3-year Marie Curie fellowship award to continue her post-doctoral research in the University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Her research interests concentrate on the optimization and analysis of planning and operation problems for power systems under renewable generation uncertainty.