John Simmins

John J. Simmins received his B.S. and a Ph.D. in Ceramic Science from Alfred University in 1984 and 1990 respectively. He is a Technical Executive and manages the Information and Communication Technology (ITC) for Distribution project-set at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). His current responsibilities focus on developing robust system architectures in the Smart Grid Demonstration Projects and bringing thought leadership in the area of integrating diverse applications such as Advanced Meter Infrastructure, Meter Data Management Systems, Distribution Management Systems, Customer Information Systems, Geospatial Information Systems and Outage Management Systems. Dr. Simmins also leads the EPRI efforts in the use of augmented reality and socialmedia to improve outage restoration efforts and improve grid resilience.

Dr. Simmins brings over 20 years of implementing highly integrated systems which span the latest technology to mature legacy systems. Dr. Simmins spent six years at Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative (SMECO), first as consultant and then as Applications Manager. At SMECO, he was responsible for the implementation and integration of several systems including geospatial information system (GIS), outage management system (OMS), interactive voice response (IVR), customer information system (CIS), staking application, crew call-out system and mobile workforce management. To accomplish this, he designed an enterprise semantic model for all data and implemented and enterprise service bus to link all the new systems together.

Prior to that, Dr. Simmins worked for GE Global Exchange Systems where he led large, high profile B2B ecommerce integration efforts for GE. He was responsible for all the GE internal clients as well as some of their larger clients. Dr. Simmins also implemented a project management methodology in the services delivery group.