Biography
Sarthak is a Senior R&D Staff member at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he builds agentic AI systems for energy infrastructure planning, grid resilience, and federal permitting. His work focuses on helping public agencies and energy stakeholders respond to AI-era load growth, data center demand, and the need to plan, permit, and deliver infrastructure faster.
At PNNL, Sarthak works at the intersection of AI systems, critical infrastructure, and public-sector delivery. He contributes to tools and benchmarks that make AI agents more useful in high-stakes agency workflows where outputs must be auditable, source-cited, and grounded in regulatory context.
He is a key contributor to PermitAI, a generative AI initiative for accelerating federal permitting and NEPA reviews for energy infrastructure. Related work includes the NEPA-MCP Toolkit, which gives AI agents access to federal permitting data sources and regulatory context, and DraftNEPABench, a PNNL-OpenAI collaboration benchmarking coding agents for drafting environmental review documents.
Sarthak also works on AI for grid planning and reliability. He developed GridCoPilot, an LLM-based framework for long-term grid planning and reliability analysis, and has contributed to DOE initiatives on grid modernization, including work connected to U.S. resource adequacy, reliability, and load growth.
He is a core member of the IEEE Power & Energy Society Task Force on Foundation Models. Before joining PNNL, he conducted research at Georgia Tech on EV charging infrastructure, pricing markets, and consumer behavior, with work featured by AAAI, Harvard Business School, and The New York Times.