Distinguished Engineer
Hometown: Nisland
Agricultural Engineering ,
Wanda Reder earned a Masters in Business Administration from the College of St. Thomas in 1990 after graduating from South Dakota State University in 1986. She was the vice president of energy at Davies Consulting and went on to serve as the vice president of T&D asset management at Exelon where she had responsibility for asset investment strategy, standards, engineering, planning, reliability and work management in Chicago and Philadelphia. She then served as vice president of the power systems services division at S&C Electric Company offering engineering, field service and project management capabilities to utilities, developers and industrial customers throughout the U.S. and Canada. Her additional experience included starting and leading a company that performed predictive diagnostic on underground cable and numerous leadership positions at North States Power including justification and deployment of distribution automation, planning for long-range delivery system needs and development of conservation and load management initiatives. Reder served on the IEEE Power Engineering Society (PES) Governing Board since 2022 and served as IEEE PES president in 2008. Since 2004, she researched, published and presented on the topic of the maturing power industry workforce and the challenge to attract and educate the necessary talent for the industry. To maintaining expertise for power system reliability within the context of large pending retirement attrition, her efforts have resulted in collaborations to address the challenge with NERC, NREDA, EEI, PSERC and IEEE (to name a few) to bolster the industry image, rebuild power curriculums and transfer necessary knowledge.