Biography
Sarthak is a Senior R&D Staff at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he develops agentic AI-driven tools for grid resilience, operational efficiency, and energy infrastructure permitting.
At PNNL, he collaborates with a distinguished network of U.S. Department of Energy offices, including ARPA-E, EERE, Grid Deployment Office, and the Office of Policy. He has contributed to Presidential Executive Order initiatives on grid modernization and to DOE's Resource Adequacy Report — assessing U.S. grid reliability, security, and capacity to meet surging demand from AI, data centers, and reindustrialization. He also developed GridCoPilot, among the first LLM-based frameworks for long-term grid planning.
He serves as a key contributor to PermitAI, a generative AI initiative to accelerate federal permitting for energy infrastructure. The project has received national recognition, including references in White House briefings, America's AI Action Plan, and Department of Energy announcements highlighting efforts to advance U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence.
He is also a core member of the IEEE Power & Energy Society Task Force on Foundation Models, where he contributes to advancing thought leadership on the application of foundation models in power system analysis, operations, and planning.
Prior to joining PNNL, he conducted research at Georgia Tech on optimization of electric vehicle charging infrastructure and pricing markets. His research on charging infrastructure and pricing mechanisms has been featured by AAAI, Harvard Business School, Microsoft, and The New York Times.