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EEC Faculty Junbo Zhao and Students Received Numerous Awards from IEEE PES

Junbo Zhao, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the grid modernization team lead at Eversource Energy Center, continues to receive accolades for his work in the field.

Zhao, serving as chair of the IEEE Task Force on Power System Dynamic State and Parameter Estimation, was recognized as part of the IEEE group that earned the IEEE Power and Energy Society’s Technical Committee Working Group Recognition Award for Outstanding Technical Report. The award is in recognition of outstanding performance in the development of a report that impacts the power and energy community. The committee’s report is titled “Power System Dynamic State and Parameter Estimation-Transition to Power Electronics-Dominated Clean Energy Systems.” This report aims to 1) clearly review its motivations and definitions, demonstrate its values for enhanced power system modeling, monitoring, operation, control, and protection as well as power engineering education; 2) provide recommendations to vendors, national labs, utilities, and ISOs on the use of dynamic state estimator for enhancement of the reliability, security, and resiliency of electric power systems. More information on the report and authors can be found here.

In addition to the technical report recognition, Zhao also served as the first author on the paper “Power System Dynamic State Estimation: Motivations, Definitions, Methodologies and Future Work,” which received the 2021 Best Paper Award from IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, the flagship journal in the power and energy field. The paper discusses the task force’s investigation on the motivations, definitions, and engineering values of dynamic state and parameter estimation for the reliability, security, and resilience of electric power systems. The work also provides future research needs and directions for the power engineering community. This work has received more than 235 citations according to google scholar and has been categorized as the Highly Cited Paper according to Web of Science since March 2021, i.e., the top 1% based on the number of citations received when compared to other papers published in the same field in the same year. Full details are available here.

Zhao earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech in 2018. His research interests include cyber-physical power system modeling, monitoring, uncertainty quantification, learning, dynamics, stability control, and cyber security with distributed energy resources. More information about him and his research can be found here.

Yansong Pei and Bendong Tan, two Ph.D. students under the supervision of Dr. Junbo Zhao at the University of Connecticut’s Department Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Eversource Energy Center, received awards from IEEE.

Yansong Pei, the first author of work “Data-Driven Distribution System Coordinated PV Inverter Control Using Deep Reinforcement Learning” received the 2021 IEEE Sustainable Power and Energy Conference Best Paper Award. This is a collaborative work with National Renewable Energy Lab under the support by Department of Energy. Only 20 papers out of more than 1000 papers are selected for this award. This work proposes a control solution based on reinforcement learning to control the distributed PV and its smart inverter. The proposed solution aims at minimizing PV real power curtailment and maintaining network voltage at an acceptable range simultaneously. 

Bendong Tan received the 2021 Outstanding Reviewer Award from IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, the flagship journal in the power and energy field. He was recognized by his outstanding reviews with high quality and timeliness. 

Published: February 9, 2022

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