New SFCC Faculty in Distributed Energy Systems

Santa Fe Community College (an MSL founding member for workforce development) welcomes Frank M. Currie as its new lead faculty member for the Distributed Energy Systems Program. This position is supported by the NSF-funded NM SMART Grid Center for a four-year term, and will lead the development of the program, curricula, and degree offerings in smart grid and microgrid systems technician training. 

Frank Currie is exceptionally well-qualified for this role. He most recently worked at Sandia National Laboratories (also an MSL member) in the Energy Storage Technologies and Systems group as an R&D Engineer and member of the Energy Storage Demonstrations Team. Projects included assisting with Puerto Rico’s post-hurricane recovery efforts, on which he co-authored a research paper.

Frank also has experience as an electric utility planning engineer, an industrial automation engineer, has served with the U.S. Army as a linguist, and has taught at the secondary and community college level as an adjunct faculty member at SFCC. Following his own initial studies at a two-year program, he earned a BS in Electrical Engineering at Michigan State, and is currently completing his MS in Electrical Engineering at NM State University’s esteemed Electric Utility Management Program.

His range of experience includes electric utility systems planning and operations; building energy and facilities management; microgrid and energy storage system design and implementation; SCADA operations; wind and solar project development in the southwest; residential and commercial energy consulting; implementing energy storage and microgrid projects across the nation; and design and construction of a state-of-the-art data acquisition system in Sandia National Laboratories’ new Storage Controls and Analytics Lab.

Frank has also been involved with the evolution of sustainable technologies programs at SFCC since 2007, and served as the Sandia National Laboratories project lead in support of SFCC’s BEAM Training Center and planned SFCC microgrid.