On July 1, 2025, Alberto J. Lamadrid, Professor of Economics and Co-Associate Director of the Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy (I-CPIE), was appointed the Institute’s third director, taking over from Shalinee Kishore, Iacocca Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Rossin College of Engineering at Lehigh University. Kishore had been I-CPIE’s director since 2022. Carlos E. Romero, Director of the Energy Research Center and professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, will remain I-CPIE’s Associate Director.
I-CPIE was founded in 2018 via an initiative from Rossin College Dean Stephen P. DeWeerth. DeWeerth came to Lehigh in 2016 from Georgia Tech, which had an emphasis on interdisciplinary research. He wanted to create a similar environment at Lehigh, and formed a group of faculty, including Kishore, to identify research areas that fit three criteria: a demonstrated potential for solving social grand challenges, showed areas of strength for Lehigh, and the capacity to enable large funding proposals. After campus resources, strengths, and plans were identified, three institutes were formed: I-CPIE, the Institute for Functional Materials and Devices (I-FMD), and the Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems, and Computation (I-DISC).
I-CPIE’s first director was Richard Sause, John T. Stuart Professor of Structural Engineering, with Kishore as Associate Director and Lamadrid as a faculty member. Sause’s experience as director of the Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems (ATLSS) Engineering Research Center gave him the operational expertise and administrative experience to put I-CPIE into motion as a proposal incubator.
When Sause stepped aside in 2022, Kishore became director with Romero and Lamadrid as Co-Associate directors. Lamadrid had been hired by Lehigh in 2012 as part of another interdisciplinary effort, Integrated Networks for Electricity (INE), an initiative focused on electricity and smart grids. With Sause handling I-CPIE’s operations duties, Kishore took on the challenge of forming connections among faculty for I-CPIE-related funding proposals. Some of these connections stemmed from her efforts in expanding her own expertise, which was grounded in communications and networking technologies, while others were specific to I-CPIE. Similarly, she found reaching out to other faculty with related interests helped her not only build research collaborations for herself but also contributed to her ability to create research teams that were well-positioned for more types of interdisciplinary funding opportunities.
As Lamadrid takes on director duties at I-CPIE, Kishore will focus on the Center for Advancing Community Electrification Solutions (ACES), which is one of Lehigh’s three newly launched University Research Centers (URC). Kishore will serve as director of ACES, while Arindam Banerjee, Paul B. Reinhold Professor and Department Chair, Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, is the center’s Co-Director.
Lamadrid joined Lehigh as part of a cluster hire involving economics, mathematics, energy engineering systems, and power system electronics for INE. While he is an economist, his roots are in engineering; he has a electrical engineering degree and started his career in power systems. This gives him a dual perspective: for some issues, he approaches a problem like an electrical engineer–but he can also see the market at work. “Generally the two inform each other,” he says. Both disciplines work with finite resources, such as money, time, space, and policy restrictions, and need to allocate resources intentionally. This is, Lamadrid says, the traditional definition of economics, involving organizing, distribution, and tradeoffs.
His training in economics prompts him to think in terms of incentives–what motivates a person or company to take an action–and it’s not always financial or obviously logical. He views the current adjustments to the federal funding model through this lens. Through its budget reallocations, the U.S. government is incentivizing a focus on fundamental research. He also sees the private sector as a potential source of funding–it’s the “most dynamic way of doing business”–and will look for research partners who provide value for their organizations. He’s also thinking through opportunities for I-CPIE with state governments, nongovernmental organizations, and nonprofits as partners and community allies.
Lamadrid takes the helm of I-CPIE at a time of uncertainty, with proposed cuts to federal funding to I-CPIE’s usual funding agencies, such as the Department of Energy (DOE) and National Science Foundation (NSF). This challenge is what drew him to taking on the directorship, he says. In his native Colombia, there are fewer government-sponsored projects and more industry-led ones. Lamadrid considers the current uncertain funding climate in the U.S. an opportunity to think outside the box, and he’d like to see faculty diversify their funding sources. Industry, state, and foundations are on his list of potential partners. “This is going to be a good challenge in terms of how we start exploring new things,” he says. “We can bring more collaboration directly to things that companies are going to be caring about. We need to diversify our sources.”
Lehigh University and the three interdisciplinary research institutes elevate each other, Lamadrid says. Lehigh provides the supportive infrastructure that allows the IRIs and other interdisciplinary research to be possible. I-CPIE, I-DISC, and I-FMD act as incubators of ideas: they allow collaboration, working with someone whose ideas are “maybe tangential but can complement and enhance some of the work that you’re doing” elevates the research and makes larger, more complex proposals possible. This was one of Kishore’s vital contributions to I-CPIE, he says.
And he hopes to expand on Kishore’s ability to bring faculty together for research. “She is very good at communicating with people and forming teams. And right now we need to form more teams.” For her part, Kishore is excited to see what Lamadrid can do at the helm of I-CPIE. “I’m excited about Alberto becoming director,” she says. “He has energy and ideas, and he embodies the interdisciplinary e