Diego Cerrai

Ph.D. Candidate

Civil & Environmental Engineering

Short Bio

Diego Cerrai is a PhD student in Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut (UConn), where he found the right environment to follow his two passions: meteorology and statistics. He is responsible for research and development of the University of Connecticut Outage Prediction Model (UConn OPM), an operational framework that, using statistical and machine learning models, integrates weather forecasts and electric grid characteristics to predict storm power outages across utility service territories. On behalf of the Eversource Energy Center (EEC), he is also responsible for the daily communication of weather forecasts and outage predictions to electric utility managers.

Diego obtained his bachelor degree in Physics at the University of Pisa, and his master degree in Physics of the Earth System at the University of Bologna. For completing his master thesis he studied the dynamics of Mediterranean Hurricanes (Medicanes) at the Institute of Atmospheric Science and Climate of the Italian National Research Center (ISAC-CNR). The results of his master thesis, consisting in the formulation of two new meteorological variables, the dry potential vorticity (DPV) and the wet potential vorticity (WPV) were published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).