Umair Zia is the Director of Electric Distribution Engineering for Massachusetts at Eversource Energy. Since joining Eversource in 2017, Umair has worked on numerous initiatives including; major reliability improvement projects; enhanced collaboration with academia; led the development of an award winning state of the art tool that provide insights and analysis on sustained and momentary outages; creation of a team to perform DER interconnection studies and creation of a comprehensive engineering training program. Prior to joining Eversource, Umair worked for Potomac Electric Power Company in Washington D.C. where he held several leadership positions in Electric Operations and Engineering. Umair holds a master’s degree in Systems Engineering, a graduate certificate in Mechanical Engineering, and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, all from the University of Maryland. Umair is also a member of board of directors for Discovery Museum of Acton, MA.