The IEEE Industrial Electronics Society has just announced the 2021 recipients of the society’s awards! Congratulations to them!

IES would also like to express great appreciations to the IES Awards & Honors Committee chaired by Hiromasa Haneda.

Dr.-Ing. Eugene Mittelmann Achievement Award

Recipient: Carlo Cecati

University of L’Aquila, Italy

Citation: For contributions in the area of industrial electronics

Carlo Cecati, IEEE Fellow, class 2006, received the Dr. Ing. degree in electrotechnical engineering in 1983. Since then, he has been with the University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy, where since 2006 he has been a Professor in industrial electronics and drives with the Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics. From 2015 till 2017, he was a Qianren Talents Professor (1000 Talents Program Distinguished Professor) with the Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China.

His research interests include power electronics, distributed generation, smart grids, and transportation electrification.  In these fields, he has contributed to digital control of power converters with parallel processing systems based on the transputer, microcontrollers, FPGA, and complex multiprocessor architectures and with unconventional non-linear control algorithms including fuzzy logic, passivity based control, flatness control, and others. He has also contributed in the area of multilevel converters and their modulations, resonant power converters,  communications for smart grids, WPT.

In 2018 He was included in the list of  “Highly cited” researchers by Clarivate Analytics. Prof. Cecati was the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS from 2013 to 2015 and a Co-EiC from 2010-2012. He was a co-recipient for the 2012 and of the 2013 Best Paper Award from the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, of the 2012 Best Paper Award for the IEEE Industrial Electronics Magazine, and of the 2019 Outstanding Paper Award from the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS. In 2017, he was the recipient of the Antony J. Hornfeck Award from the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society for “Extraordinary Editor-in-Chief Activity and Innovation Brought to the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics”. Since 2012 he has been the Chief Technical Officer for DigiPower Srl, L’Aquila, Italy, an innovative R&D SME active in the field of power electronics.
For his professional achievements, in 2019 Prof. Carlo Cecati was appointed “Commendatore al merito della Repubblica Italiana” by the President of the Republic of Italy.

Anthony J. Hornfeck Service Award

Recipient: Roberto Oboe

University of Padova, Italy

Citation: For outstanding service to IES and improvement of the society operations

Roberto Oboe obtained the Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering in 1988 from the University of Padova, Padova, Italy. During 1990 he has been visiting researcher at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Keio University – Yokohama – Japan. He obtained the Doctorate degree from the University of Padova in 1992. From 1993 to 2003, he has been with the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informatica of the University of Padova. From 2003 to 2008 he has been Associate Professor in Automatic Control at the Department of Mechanical and Structural engineering, University of Trento. Since 2008, he is Associate Professor in Automatic Control at the University of Padova, Dept. of Management and Engineering.

In 1996 he has been visiting the Biorobotics Lab. of the Univ. of Washington, Seattle, where he participated to the realization of a system for the manipulation of objects in shared virtual environments. In 1997 he has been at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he has been working on Internet-based telerobotics with haptic feedback. In 2000, he has been visiting scholar at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research, UCSD. In 2002, he has been visiting faculty at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Univ. of California, Berkeley.

His interests are in the fields of Motion Control, Control and applications of MEMS devices, Applied Digital Control, Telerobotics, Virtual Mechanism, Haptic Devices, Biomedical Equipments. He is author/coauthor of more than 200 contributions, plus 6 international patents. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and, for the IES, he served as VP for Planning and Development, Chair of the Technical Committee on Motion Control and Chair of the Management Committee of the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics. He is currently VP for Technical Activities, Senior AdCom member, and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics and the OJIES.

IEEE J. David Irwin Early Career Award

Recipient: Zhen Zhang

Tianjin University,  China

Citation: For outstanding contributions to intelligent control for emerging power conversions and drives

Zhen Zhang (S’11–M’13–SM’15) received the B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in electrical engineering from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, in 2004 and 2007, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, in 2014.
In 2014, he was a Visiting Scholar with IBM Research Laboratory supported by IBM Global Great Minds Program. During 2014 to 2019, he served as a Postdoctoral Fellow and an Honorary Associate Professor with The University of Hong Kong. Currently, he is an Associate Professor with the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at Tianjin University and Humboldt Research Fellow at Technical University of Munich.

His research interests focus on the advanced control for power conversion with emphasis on wireless power transfer, multi-phase motor drives, model predictive control, and edge computing etc. He has authored and coauthored more than 60 internationally refereed papers as well as two books published by Wiley-IEEE Press and Cambridge University Press, respectively.

Dr. Zhang is currently the Chair of IEEE Beijing Section IES Chapter – Tianjin and an Associate Editor for the IEEE INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS. He is the recipient of the Humboldt Research Fellowship, Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Fellowship, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Visiting Fellowship, 2020 Best Paper Award for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, and 2021 IEEE J. David Irwin Early Career Award.

IEEE Bimal Bose Award for Industrial Electronics Applications in Energy Systems

Recipient: Josep M. Guerrero

Aalborg University, Denmark

Citation: For pioneering contributions to renewable energy based microgrids

Josep M. Guerrero (S’01-M’04-SM’08-FM’15) received the B.S. degree in telecommunications engineering, the M.S. degree in electronics engineering, and the Ph.D. degree in power electronics from the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, in 1997, 2000 and 2003, respectively. Since 2011, he has been a Full Professor with the Department of Energy Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark, where he is responsible for the Microgrid Research Program. From 2019, he became a Villum Investigator by The Villum Fonden, which supports the Center for Research on Microgrids (CROM) at Aalborg University, being Prof. Guerrero the founder and Director of the same centre (www.crom.et.aau.dk).

His research interests is oriented to different microgrid frameworks in applications like microgrid clusters, IoT-based and digital twins, maritime microgrids for electrical ships, vessels, ferries and seaports, and space microgrids applied to nanosatellites and closed ecological systems. Prof. Guerrero is an Associate Editor for a number of IEEE TRANSACTIONS. He has published more than 700 journal papers in the fields of microgrids and renewable energy systems, which are cited more than 60,000 times.

During seven consecutive years, from 2014 to 2020, he was awarded by Clarivate Analytics (former Thomson Reuters) as Highly Cited Researcher with 50 highly cited papers. He received the 2021 IEEE Bimal Bose Award for Industrial Electronics Applications in Energy Systems.

IEEE Rudolf Chope Research & Development Award

Recipient: Lucia Lo Bello

University of Catania, Italy

Citation: For outstanding contributions to research and development of traffic scheduling and network management techniques to support real-time communications on industrial wireless sensor networks

Prof. Lucia Lo Bello (MD’94, PhD’98) is tenured Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Catania, Italy. She qualified as Full Professor in the Italian National Habilitation (ASN). She was Guest Professor at the University of Malardalen, Sweden, in 2014 and Visiting Researcher with the Department of Computer Engineering, Seoul National University, Korea (2000-2001).

Her research interests include industrial communications and wireless sensor networks, automotive communications and real-time embedded systems. Prof. Lo Bello authored or co-authored more than 200 technical papers and book chapters in these areas. She is responsible for the University of Catania of several national and European projects and also the principal investigator of several research contracts with international companies. She is author of a granted US patent on traffic management in Ethernet switches. Since 2004 she participates to standardization activities relevant to wired and wireless industrial networks at both national (CEI) and international level (IEC).

Prof. Lo Bello was the recipient of the IEEE IES Early Career Award in 2008. She is Associated Editor of several peer-reviewed international journals, including the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics and the Industrial Electronics Magazine. Prof. Lo Bello is Senior Member of the IEEE since 2009. She was the Chair of the IES Technical Committee on Factory Automation for two terms (2014-15, 2016-17) and AdCom Member-at-Large. She is the IES Secretary for the 2020-21 term. Since 2017, Prof. Lo Bello is the IES representative within IEEE Women in Engineering and is responsible for the Women in IES initiative within the Growth Center project. She regularly serves as Track Chair, General Chair or Technical Program Chair for several IES-sponsored conferences, such as, ETFA, INDIN, IECON, HSI and WFCS.

IEEE IES Best Chapter Award

Western Australia IES Chapter 

Citation: For recognition of Outstanding Chapter Activity in 2020

Chair: Hai Wang