Awards/Honors 2025-2026
Looking forward to a great academic year ahead!
Department Honors and Awards
The Electrical and Engineering Dept at UConn would like to thank alumnus Gordon Gu for his generous donation of a scholarship in his name for our department. The scholarship will provide support to students entering or currently enrolled in the UConn College of Engineering who have demonstrated academic excellence, with a GPA of 3.5 or above. Gordon received his M.S. from ECE in 1991, and is now the CEO of Accelight Technologies, Inc. (ATI).
L-R: Liang Zhang, Rajeev Bansal, Gordon Gu, John Chandy
IEEE NAPS 2025 Conference was held in Hartford in October. Dr.Zongjie Wang was the General Chair and Dr. Sung Yeul Park served as a student program chair.
The Northeast Power Electronics Symposium (NEPES) was hosted in November by the Connecticut Power Electronics Center of Excellence.
Faculty Honors and Awards
Prof. Sung Yeul Park has been appointed as Director of the Real-Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) Lab at the Eversource Center.
Prof. Bahram Javidi has received the ECE Research Award and Prof. Tom Katsouleas has received the ECE Teaching Award for the 24/25 Academic Year.
Prof. Lei Wang has been appointed as the ECE Department Graduate Program Director.
Prof. Krishna Pattipati received a US Patent entitled ” Remaining Useful Life Determination for Power Electronic Devices”.
Monty Escabi received an NIH grant of $334k entitled” CRCNS: Predictive Models of Human Speech Recognition in Natural Environment Noise”.
Graduate Student Awards
At the Symposium on Diagnostics for Electrical Machines, Power Electronics & Drives Pengwei Li won the best student demo award for ” Fault-tolerance single phase 5L-ANPC inverter” and Yi Luo had an honorable mention for “Comparison of a Hybrid CHB Inverter Using Si, SiC, and GaN Power Devices”. Both Grad students are advisees of Dr. Ali Bazzi.
Soroush Vahedi, Ayah Abdallah and Sandra George graduated from the John Lof Leadership Academy for Graduate Engineering Students.
Undergraduate Student Awards
ECE Undergrads Tyler King and Nick Bailey presented their work at the 2025 Clean Energy Summit!
The presentation discussed Using Multi-Modal UAV Imagery For Proactive Photovoltaic Maintenace.
This looks at drone-based thermal and visual inspections and how they can help identify underperforming panels and recover warranty-eligible capacity across Connecticut’s solar installations.
Fellowships
| Alaa Selim | Summer Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship |
| Ryan Harvey | Peter Willett Fellowship |
| Steven Allaby | GAANN |
| Allen Legassey | GAANN |
| Esma Sahin | IASE |
| Bikash Pal | IASE |
| Yue Li | Eversource Energy |
TA Awards
| Fall 2025 | |
| Spring 2026 |
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