Forum Contributors

Rob Gramlich is Founder and President of Grid Strategies LLC where he provides economic policy analysis for clients on electric transmission and power markets in pursuit of low-cost de-carbonization.  He is co-founder of Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, the WATT Coalition, and the Future Power Markets Forum. Rob oversaw transmission and power market policy for the American Wind Energy Association from 2005 through 2016 as Senior Vice President for Government and Public Affairs, Interim CEO, and Policy Director. He was Economic Advisor to FERC Chairman Pat Wood III from 2001 to 2005, Senior Economist at PJM Interconnection in 1999 and 2000, Senior Associate at PG&E National Energy Group in 2000-2001, and an analyst at the FERC Office of Economic Policy, ICF Resources, the World Resources Institute, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the 1990s. He testifies frequently before the US Congress, US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), US Department of Energy, and state legislatures and regulatory commissions.  He has served on advisory committees for the U.S. Department of Energy and the North American Energy Standards Board, on boards of a number of regional clean energy organizations. Rob has a Master of Public Policy (MPP) degree from UC Berkeley and a BA with Honors in Economics from Colby College.

David R. Hill is an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. He serves on the board of directors of the New York Independent System Operator LLC, and also owns and operates his own solo law practice and energy industry consulting firm. From 2012 to 2018, Mr. Hill served as Executive Vice President & General Counsel of NRG Energy, Inc., one of the largest generators of both conventional and renewable electricity in the United States and a large seller of retail electric energy and services. As NRG’s general counsel, Mr. Hill was responsible for the company’s legal, regulatory, environmental and government affairs activities. He also served as Executive Vice President & General Counsel of NRG Yield, Inc. from 2012 – 2018. From 2009 – 2012, Mr. Hill was a partner and co-head of the energy practice at Sidley Austin LLP in Washington, DC. From 2005 to 2009 he served as General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Energy, and for three years before that was DOE’s Deputy General Counsel for Energy Policy. Earlier in his career Mr. Hill was a partner at Wiley, Rein & Fielding in Washington and at Blackwell Sanders in Kansas City, Mo. He began his legal career as a law clerk for Judge James K. Logan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and as an associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington. Mr. Hill holds a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from the University of Missouri, and his law degree from the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, where he served as Editor in Chief of the Northwestern University Law Review.

Benjamin Hobbs is the Theodore and Kay Schad Professor of Environmental Management with the Department of Environmental Health & Engineering, Johns Hopkins University (JHU), Baltimore, MD, USA, and the Founding Director of the JHU Environment, Energy, Sustainability & Health Institute. Dr. Hobbs is the Associate Director, Yale-JHU SEARCH (Solutions for Energy, Air, Climate, and Health) Center. He chairs the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator, joining the committee in 2002 after several years as a consultant to FERC’s Office of the Economic Advisor. Dr. Hobbs is on the editorial boards of several journals, such as Energy Economics. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Institute for Operations Research & Management Science (INFORMS). Dr. Hobbs received his BS degree from South Dakota State University, a master’s degree in resources management and policy from SUNY-Syracuse, and a PhD in environmental systems engineering from Cornell University. He was a researcher at Brookhaven and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and then joined the faculties of systems and civil engineering at Case Western Reserve University prior to moving to Johns Hopkins. Dr. Hobbs has had visiting appointments at many universities and research labs, including being an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College at Cambridge University.

Lauren Campbell is Director of Policy and Economic Analysis at Grid Strategies. She specializes in generator interconnection, western market expansion, and other wholesale electric market issues. She also supports the Working for Advanced Transmission Technologies (WATT) Coalition. Lauren brings extensive experience in policy development and economic analysis to this role.

Prior to joining Grid Strategies, Lauren worked at FERC for 12 years where she held a variety of positions. She most recently served as Deputy Division Director in the Office of Energy Policy and Innovation where she focused on rulemakings and other Commission priority efforts concerning generator interconnection, wholesale electric market design, advanced transmission technologies, and extreme weather planning. She also served as a technical advisor to Commissioner Allison Clements and as an economist in the Office of Energy Market Regulation where she developed expertise in CAISO and western market issues. Earlier in her career, Lauren worked as an economics fellow at the USDA Forest Service and as an environmental consultant in California.

Lauren holds a Master of Environmental Management with a focus on environmental economics from Duke University and a BA in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Abe Silverman is an assistant research scholar with the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI) focusing on bringing academics, business leaders, and state and federal regulators together to solve the most pressing barriers to the clean energy transition. He joined Hopkins in July 2024.

Silverman is a lawyer licensed to practice law in Maryland and Washington D.C. and received his Juris Doctor from George Washington University Law School in 2001. Before coming to Hopkins, Silverman served as the managing director of non-technical barriers to the clean energy transition at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, starting in April 2023.

Prior to his work at Columbia University, he was general counsel and executive policy counsel for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities from May 2019 to April 2023. Prior to going into state service, Silverman was an executive at NRG Energy, Inc., leading the company’s state and federal markets policy work. Silverman also served at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Silverman facilitates the Northeast States Collaborative on Interregional Transmission (States Collaborative), which is made up of representatives from ten states—Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont—that have come together to coordinate on transmission grid expansion efforts in coordination with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Silverman received a Bachelor of Science in environmental geology and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Maryland in 1998.

Cheryl A. LaFleur is the Chair of the Board of ISO New England, where she has served as a director since 2019. LaFleur also serves on the Advisory Boards of the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy (where she also served as a distinguished visiting fellow and senior research scholar) and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Previously, LaFleur was one of the longest serving commissioners on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, serving as a commissioner from 2010-2019, and chairing the Commission from 2013-2015 and during 2017. Before her FERC tenure, LaFleur held several executive positions at National Grid USA and its predecessor, New England Electric System, including Executive Vice President and COO, President of the New England Distribution Companies and General Counsel. She began her career as an attorney at Ropes and Gray in Boston. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Princeton University. 

Richard Doying is a senior executive with expertise and in-depth knowledge of multiple areas of the electric sector, including Regional Transmission Organizations, energy market design and operation, power system operations, Federal and State regulation, and strategy development and planning. Richard held several positions at MISO leading design, implementation and operations of MISO markets and reliability functions. Most recently, he served as MISO Executive Vice President of Market and Grid Strategies, where he led the evaluation of emerging industry trends and the creation of a strategic roadmap to enhance MISO’s markets and reliability operations to facilitate power sector de-carbonization. Prior to joining MISO, he was Director of Strategy and New Initiatives at PG&E National Energy Group (1997-2002), and a Project Manager at ICF Resources (1993-1997). He has been a member and chairman of the Board of Directors of the NERC Midwest Reliability Organization, and an advisory board member for the Indiana University, Richard G. Lugar Center for Renewable Energy. Richard has a Master of Public Policy degree from The University of Minnesota, and a BA in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles.