The 53rd NAPS was held in person at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, on November 14-16, 2021. This event was chaired by Dr. Kate Davis (Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University) collaborating with Dr. Thomas Overbye as Technical Program Chair, Dr. Robert Balog as Treasurer, Dr. Adam Birchfield as Publication Chair, and Dr. Le Xie as Industry Liason. In total, 236 people registered to this event, and 157 technical papers were selected. The papers presented will be available in the IEEE proceedings of the conference on IEEE Xplore. NSF Travel grant helped defray the expenses of 45 qualified students presenting papers. In addition, hotel accommodation of 96 students were supported from an IEEE-PES grant. All sponsors are recognized here.
For Best Paper Awards, the following papers were selected:
- Best paper No.1: Transmission grid outage statistics extracted from a web page logging outages in Northeast America
Nichelle’Le Carrington, Ian Dobson, Zhaoyu Wang
- Best paper No.2: A Case Study on Home Microgrid Effectiveness and Resiliency Return on Investment
Matthew Egan, Mohammed Ben-Idris
- Best paper No.3: GPS Spoofing attacks on PMUs Practical Feasibility and Counter Measures
Fakhri Saadedeen, Anamitra Pal
For Spark Awards recognizing outstanding participation of students, the following individuals were selected:
- Spark Award No. 1: William Danickez – University of Rhode Island
- Spark Award No. 2: Ramin Vakile – Arizona State University
- Spark Award No. 3: Michael Abdelmalak – University of Nevada, Reno
After concluding the conference, 
some attendees participated in a tour including hands-on simulation exercises at the Smart Grid Control Room Lab located at the Center for Infrastructure Renewal on the RELLIS campus of Texas A&M University System.