Rick Hillis, Vice President of Transmission Systems Support, Tri-State Transmission and Generation Association, Inc. – Rick joined Tri-State in 2015 and has been part of the operations leadership team for over 7 years. In his present role, he reports to the Senior Vice President for Operations, and leads the areas of telecom engineering, telecom commercial business (leasing of dark fiber and colocation space), revenue metering, substation automation, meter data management, and power system protection and technical analysis. Previously at Tri-State, he led the transmission maintenance – technical support team for over a year. Prior to Tri-State, he was a member of the WAPA leadership team in the Desert Southwest Region for 13 years leading the areas of transmission maintenance, engineering, and construction, for 6 years he was a member of Salt River Project (SRP)’s Power Delivery leadership team in the areas of telecom engineering, system protection, and SCADA, and he spent the first 10 years in the utility industry as a telecom/SCADA field engineer at WAPA. Rick has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University with an emphasis in electronics and telecommunications.