Professor Saifur Rahman is the founding director of the Advanced Research Institute at Virginia Tech where he is the Joseph R. Loring professor of electrical and computer engineering. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy. He is a vice president of the IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) and a member-at-large of the IEEE-USA Energy Policy Committee. Currently he is serving as the chair of the US Naitonal Science Foundation Advisory Committee for International Science and Engineering. He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE PES, and has lectured on smart grid, energy efficient lighting solutions, renewable energy, demand response, distributed generation and critical infrastructure protection topics in over 30 countries on all six continents. 

He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech in 1978. His industry and government experience includes work with the Tokyo Electric Power Company in Japan, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, Progress Energy (Carolina Power and Light Company), and consultancy for the World Bank, the United Nations, US Agency for the International Development and the Asian Development Bank.