Vito Longo received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Louisiana State University in 1969 and immediately went to work at a local consultant doing design and planning for Louisiana rural electric cooperatives. He moved to Power Technology, Inc in Schenectady, NY, in 1972 where he contributed to and directed transmission line design criteria studies for international clients. He was also a principal investigator on compact transmission line and high phase order transmission R&D projects. After working on special studies in the Pacific Gas and Electric Transmission Lines Department for five years, he became a Senior Project Manager at the Electric Power Research Institute in 1984. There, in addition to delivering several design modules of the Transmission Lines Workstation Software, he also took a lightning detection project from a regional scientific investigation to a national network that is today commercially delivering data to utilities across the U.S. Vito’s other project work at EPRI advanced the state-of-practice in a variety of distribution and transmission technology areas:

• Foundation analysis and design
• Distribution and transmission lightning performance calculations
• Static and dynamic conductor thermal ratings
• Radio and audible noise (interference) calculations
• Transmission line optimization studies
• Market assessment studies on:
  · revenue meters,
  · power system control, and
  · power quality markets.
• Underground cable maintenance management research pilot
• Risk / value investigations of distributed generation use
  

In January 2006 he joined T&D World as the Technology Editor.