Bendong Tan (below left) and Yansong Pei (below right), both Ph.D. students under the supervision of Prof. Junbo Zhao, received two Best Paper Awards from the 2022 IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) General Meeting. Yansong Pei contributed to a winning paper entitled “Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Realistic Distribution System Voltage Control using PV Inverters” and Bendong Tan contributed to “Explainable Bayesian Neural Network for Probabilistic Transient Stability Analysis Considering Wind Energy“. The IEEE PES General Meeting is the largest annual conference for IEEE PES and each year, only about 30 papers out of more than 1500 submissions are selected to be the best conference paper. IEEE PES is the second largest society among all IEEE societies.

 

 

Bendong Tan’s first authored journal paper, entitled “Power System Inertia Estimation: Review of Methods and the Impacts of Converter-Interfaced Generations“, has received the 2022 Best Journal Paper Prize from the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems (a Tier 1 journal). Only 3 papers out of 1,600 published papers have been selected from the past two-year publications for this prestigious recognition.  Bendong has also received another Best Paper Award from IEEE PES ISGT 2022 with his first authored paper “Interpretable Data-Driven Probabilistic Power System Load Margin Assessment with Uncertain Renewable Energy and Loads”. This is the third best paper award Bendong has received within a short period of time. In addition, Bendong has been recognized as 2022 Outstanding Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.

Abdulmajeed Almalki won the CMOC Best Poster Paper award for his paper entitled: “Design and Simulation of D Latch Circuit with Multi-bit Handling Capability Using QDC-SWS FETs.”

Jinxian Zhang, a PhD student advised by Prof. Junbo Zhao, has received the Best Paper Award from the 6th IEEE Conference on Energy Internet and Energy System Integration. This is a collaborative work with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory under the ongoing Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office.  Jinxian’s paper is entitled, “Multi-fidelity Gaussian Process for Distribution System Voltage Probabilistic Estimation with PVs”.

Another of Prof. Zhao’s advisees, Jason Philhower, received the IEEE PES Connecticut chapter 2022 Outstanding Chapter Volunteer Award with the citation: For outstanding volunteer service to promote chapter activities and grow the chapter members.

 

Winners of the IEEE/ECE Poster Competition were: 1st place – Tashfiq Kashem, 2nd place, Yen-Che Hsaio, and 3rd place, Haoyi Wang.

Graduate student Leila Chebbo, advised by Ali Bazzi, was one of only 12 students to receive a Professional Development Award to attend the iREDEFINE Workshop, a workshop designed to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities (URMs) among the faculty in ECE departments.

Graduate student Hasan Talukder, advised by Ali Gokirmak and Helena Silva, won the best ECE poster award at the 2023 SoE Poster Competition.

Tong Su, an advisee of Prof. Junbo Zhao, has received a best paper award from the flagship conference IEEE PES General Meeting 2023, for paper entitled “Analytic Input Convex Neural Networks-based Model Predictive Control for Power System Transient Stability Enhancement“.

Ketian Ye, an advisee of Prof. Junbo Zhao, received the prestigious 2023 IEEE PES Technical Committee Prize Paper Award for the work (Ketian Ye, Junbo Zhao, Nan Duan, Yingchen Zhang, “Physics-Informed Sparse Gaussian Process for Probabilistic Stability Analysis of Large-Scale Power System with Dynamic PVs and Loads,” IEEE Trans. Power Systems, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 2868-2879, 2023.) This is a collaborative work with both Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory under the Department of Energy funding support.

Qian Yang, one of Prof. Krishna Pattipati’s advisees, has been selected for a best paper award from the IEEE Transportation Electrification Conference.

The IEEE PES student chapter was selected as one of the three best performing PES student branch chapters in all IEEE regions.

 

 

Undergraduate Student Awards

Frost Robotics club was awarded a $10k grant from Norwalk Havoc Robotics League.

 

Undergraduate students Peter Chardovayne, Allan Feygin, and Uiliam Kutrolli, along with their advisor Zongjie Wang, received the 2nd best paper award for their paper “Feasibility of Shiftable Loads: An Expansion of Deferrable Loads in Distribution Systems” at the 2022 North American Power Symposium

Jaques Goosen and Tao Liu won best poster paper Award at CMOC.

Nick Satta and his teammates placed 3rd in CoMIS – which is an opportunity for future IT leaders to test their business acumen, problem-solving, teamwork, and presentation skills in a case competition designed to simulate real-world business conditions.

 

 

 

Left to right – Tyler Goodwin (BUS), Julie Somma (MEM), Nick Satta (ECE) 

 

 

 

Undergraduate Senior Design Team 2301  (with members, Abram Rosario, Dawid Karpiej, Alfred Lee,  and Uiliam Kutrolli) was chosen to compete in the finals of the IEEE International Future Energy Challenge, which is an international competition with the intention of developing innovative solutions in the power electronics field. The team earned the Educational Progress Award with their Single-Phase Solid State Transformer project. 

 

TA Awards