Yelena Vardanyan is an international expert in the Ministry of Environment of the Republic of Armenia and serves as a consultant at Tetra Tech in the Market Liberalization and Electricity Trade (MLET) program, which aims to support the development of a new Armenian electricity market model. She was a Post Doctoral researcher at DTU Compute (Danish Technical University). She received her Masters degree from the department of Industrial Engineering & Systems Management, at the American University of Armenia (2007). Yelena holds a PhD in Electric Power Systems division, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology). Her research interests include renewable energy planning, electricity markets and its economics, distributed energy resources and its integration of power systems, application of stochastic and bi-level optimization as mathematical tools to solve current and future smart grid challenges.