Dr. Gabriel J. Soto is a staff researcher in the Statistical Simulation and Optimization group within the Integrated Energy Systems department at Idaho National Laboratory. Dr. Soto has been a key developer for the Framework for Optimization of Resources, Controls, and Economics (FORCE) software tools since joining INL in 2022.  In his work as a modeling and simulations engineer, he has developed new capabilities for the FORCE toolset to simulate optimal dispatch strategies for nuclear and various other energy generators that are driven by time series signals with varying amounts of uncertainty. He has helped implement these strategies within a stochastic optimization network that simultaneously optimizes capacity sizes of energy producers and storage components for maximum technical and economic performance in multi-commodity markets. 

Prior to joining INL in 2022, Dr. Soto worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison starting in late 2020 studying various dispatch strategies for thermal storage coupled with advanced nuclear reactors as well as outage scheduling for modular reactors. In his PhD at Cornell University, Dr. Soto studied optimal control and astrodynamics of space telescopes in the circular restricted three body problem and optimized strategies for scheduling observations under the constraint of limited fuel and project lifetimes. 

- Techno-economic analysis
- Modeling and simulation
- Optimization techniques
- Dynamics and controls
- Energy storage strategies
- Time series analysis
- Dispatch optimization
- Capacity expansion models
- Data science
- Workflow optimization