Marija Ilic Email and Phone Number

I was born in the former Yugoslavia, and was very fortunate to have had parentswho unconditionally encouraged education and hard work. I studied Electrical Engineeringat the University of Belgrade and obtained Bachelor and Master Degreeswith specialization in Automatic Control. In the early 1980’s I was sent to learnhow to use automation to prevent wide-spread loss of electricity service infamouslyknown as “blackouts". My wonderful mentors at the University of Belgrade and atthe Michael Pupin Institute contacted Professor John Zaborszky and I was given aresearch assistant ship and was fortunate to earn my Master and Doctor of Sciencedegrees from Washington University, in St. Louis, Missouri. Dr Z, as I endedup calling him even after I graduated, and I built a working relationship whichculminated in writing a joint 900 page book in 2000. I learned so much from him!It would take too long to talk about my path after I finished my graduatestudies. In short, it was juggling two body family challenges of one sort of theother in academia; plowing the way from being the first female tenure track assistantprofessor at the School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell; getting tenured in fouryears at UIUC, and going through a divorce with two young children the sameyear; taking a step down, giving up on tenured position, for personal reasons andmoving to EECS at MIT; going through two evaluations for promotion into a fullprofessor and failing two times for not well understood reasons; being invited asa tenured full professor in two departments at CMU, the first tenured woman inECE there; shuttling back and forth between Boston, home with three children,and Pittsburgh, where I built the first power systems program at ECE and startedmy beloved Electric Energy Systems Group. Finally, getting tired of commutingand many lonely evenings without my family, and returning recently to MIT.While this path sounds pretty rocky, often lonely and without a big brotherwatching out for my professional growth, today I am incredibly grateful for all thepeople I have interacted with and learned from; for my big birthday my former studentsdocumented our interactions, https://eesg-dev.mit.edu/marija-ilic-workshop/and made an academic tree as a present to me. I continue learning from people I work with and sharing what I knowwith those who reach out and ask me to do so. There are so many young peoplewith huge potential to lead in the field of the changing electric power industry, andthese are truly exciting time full of both challenges and opportunities.