Yitian Dai

Welcoming Dr Yitian Dai as a DAFNI Fellow!

Yitian is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Manchester.

Yitian says, “Being awarded a DAFNI Fellowship is a real highlight for me as an early-career researcher. My research brings together climate risk and power systems, exploring how a changing climate threatens the resilience of our electricity infrastructure.

“I am excited to use the DAFNI platform to make these methods and datasets more accessible across the infrastructure research community, and to build closer connections between academia, network operators, and policymakers in support of a more resilient energy future,” she adds.

Yitian is one of 10 new DAFNI Fellows, selected from 116 applicants for the nationally competitive programme.

Her Fellowship will explore the resilience of electricity networks under climate stress, enabling climate-driven vulnerabilities in electricity networks to be better understood and shared across the UK infrastructure research community.
Each DAFNI Fellow has been awarded £10,000 to support staff time, travel, knowledge exchange, conferences, and dissemination activities. The programme also helps Fellows build networks across government, industry and academia through workshops, conferences and wider community engagement.

As part of the DAFNI Fellowship, Yitian will bring together processed climate hazard datasets, asset vulnerability models, and resilience simulation workflows onto the DAFNI platform. Together, these form an integrated, openly accessible evidence base for assessing how electricity networks perform under extreme weather.

Practical simulation tools and tutorial resources will enable researchers across infrastructure sectors to run their own assessments, supporting network operators, planners, and policymakers in managing climate-driven risks to critical national infrastructure.

Yitian’s research interests include developing computational models to assess how electricity infrastructure withstands extreme weather events under climate change. The work integrates climate data, infrastructure asset data, and network operational data to address challenges central to securing the Net Zero transition.

She completed her PhD at The University of Manchester in 2024, focusing on “Risk Assessment and Mitigation of Cascading Failures in Power Systems”. This work investigated how disturbances propagate through electricity networks and developed preventive strategies to mitigate cascading risks.

Her postdoctoral research, conducted within the Supergen Energy Networks Hub, examines how climate hazards initiate cascading failures in transmission networks. Yitian assesses how windstorms trigger sequential component failures and quantifies system resilience impacts. The models combine power systems engineering with climate impact assessment, translating weather hazards into infrastructure performance metrics. Current work extends these assessments towards multi-decade horizons, examining how resilience improves or degrades as both climate conditions and the electricity system evolve. This captures vulnerability trajectories and reveals how today’s decisions affect long-term resilience. The methodology emphasises high-resolution modelling and geospatial visualisation, sitting at the interface of engineering, climate science, and infrastructure planning.

She concludes, “DAFNI’s platform and collaborative environment are essential for scaling this research and making my resilience assessment frameworks available to the wider community. Through DAFNI, I can provide processed climate datasets, simulation workflows, and interactive tools enabling practitioners to conduct their own assessments without building models from scratch.”