Margaret W. Trzaska, PhD, PE

§1Background

Margaret Trzaska grew up on Erie’s east side, in the bungalow neighborhood off Buffalo Road and East 26th. Her father, Stanisław Trzaska, was a lineman at Pennsylvania Electric Company (later GPU, then FirstEnergy/Penelec) out of the West Lake Road garage in Millcreek Township from 1972 through 2003; the family was Polish-American working-class in the way that Erie’s East Avenue neighborhood largely was through the 1980s.

She attended Penn State Behrend through her sophomore year of undergraduate work before transferring to Carnegie Mellon as a third-year student in 2001. The transfer was unusual but practical — Behrend’s power-systems track in the late 1990s did not yet cover what would become her dissertation interest in transient propagation, and CMU did. Her BSEE from CMU was completed in 2003 with concentration in power systems and signal processing.

The PhD followed continuously — 2003 to 2008 in CMU’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department, supervised by Marija Ilic. Her dissertation, “Capacitor-Switching Transient Propagation in Industrial Distribution Systems: Time-Domain Analysis and Mitigation by Distributed Reactive Compensation,” defended in May 2008 with Granger Morgan reading. The dissertation is publicly available at CMU’s KiltHub repository. Three of its results have since been cited in IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery; the fourth result, on the propagation of medium-voltage capacitor switching events into adjacent low-voltage sensitive load groups, became part of her early consulting practice.

§2Practice focus

Within the firm, Dr. Trzaska is the lead engineer on R-04 (IEEE 519 harmonic surveys) and R-05 (voltage immunity disputes), and she takes most R-06 (grounding/bonding) matters where the engineering question requires precision power-quality measurement at the service entrance. She is on the second-position rotation for R-08 (subrogation support) matters when the working hypothesis involves a power-quality cause.

Her instrumentation expertise is concentrated in the Hioki PQ3198 (IEC 61000-4-30 Class A), the Dranetz PowerVisa PX5, and the older but still-reliable Fluke 1735 and 1773 loggers. She wrote the firm’s standing IEC 61000-4-30 deployment protocol — the procedures the firm follows when installing a Class A analyzer at a customer’s PCC, including the calibration and chain-of-custody documentation that travels with the data — and she is the principal who teaches it to associates.

Her view of the field, formed across 312 sealed reports, is that the largest single source of dispute between an industrial customer and its serving utility is the customer’s underestimation of the harmonic injection from its own VFD load. The Northwestern Paper Case File this issue (CF-2026-014) is a recent example; the firm sees one or two of the pattern per quarter.

§3Testimony record

Dr. Trzaska has been qualified as an expert in electrical engineering and power-quality engineering in the following jurisdictions and courts:

• United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Erie Division — WDPa. 11 admissions, 2014 – 2026.
• United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division — NDOH. 4 admissions, 2017 – 2025.
• Erie County Court of Common Pleas, Pennsylvania — Erie Cty CCP. 19 admissions, 2013 – 2026.
• Crawford County Court of Common Pleas, Pennsylvania — Crawford Cty CCP. 6 admissions, 2015 – 2024.
• Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, Ohio — Cuyahoga Cty CCP. 4 admissions, 2018 – 2025.
• Ashtabula County Court of Common Pleas, Ohio — Ashtabula Cty CCP. 3 admissions, 2019 – 2023.

47 depositions; 19 bench trials. No qualifications under Pennsylvania Rule of Evidence 702 / federal Rule of Evidence 702 (Daubert) have been denied. Detail records available on counsel request via the Engage page.

§4Signature investigations

Selected matters that illustrate Dr. Trzaska’s practice:

• CF-2026-014 · Northwestern Paper finishing-room. Featured this issue. Demonstrated that the customer’s own VFD harmonic injection — not utility supply distortion — was driving the drive-trip events the customer was complaining about. Read at the dossier.
• CF-2024-198 · Presque Isle State Park marina. Galvanic-stack matter; featured this issue. Dossier.
• CF-2024-088 · SEMI F47 voltage immunity dispute. Semi-conductor process customer in WDPa whose claim against the utility for sag events was supported on six of nine events and not on three; settled.
• CF-2023-201 · capacitor-bank switching transient. Industrial customer whose 480 V production equipment was experiencing controller resets coincident with the utility’s 23 kV substation capacitor-bank switching events; finding supported customer claim.
• CF-2018-079 · 60 Hz infrasonic complaint at a residential property near a 138 kV substation. Filed under R-06 with R-04 cross-protocol. Resolved without litigation; the substation was at fault on a degraded grounding electrode system; FirstEnergy/Penelec remediated.

§5Academic affiliation

Adjunct faculty at Penn State Behrend School of Engineering since 2015. Teaches EE 421 (Power System Analysis I) every other Spring semester and EE 422 (Power System Analysis II) every Fall on a rotation with two other adjunct practitioners. Wednesday-evening section, three students minimum, fourteen students maximum. She has supervised twelve senior projects since 2017, all on power-quality or grounding-system measurement topics; three of those projects have appeared in subsequent Filed Record issues with the students named as exhibit contributors.

She is a member of the IEEE Power and Energy Society and the IEEE Industry Applications Society, with Senior Member grade since 2014. She has co-authored four conference papers presented at IEEE IAS PCIC and IEEE PES T&D, three of which are listed on her IEEE Xplore profile.

§6References