IIT Armour College of Engineering Names Dr. Qing-Chang Zhong as McGraw Endowed Chair of Energy and Power Engineering and Management
Illinois Institute of Technology’s Armour College of Engineering is pleased to announce Dr. Qing-Chang Zhong as the Max McGraw Endowed Chair of Energy and Power Engineering and Management and Electrical and Computing Engineering (ECE) Professor, effective August 1, 2014.
Dr. Zhong joins IIT from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, where he is currently a Chair Professor in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, the only department in the UK dedicated to control and systems engineering and the largest of its kind in Europe. He received Ph.D’s in Control and Power Engineering (’04) from the Imperial College London and in Control Theory and Engineering (’99) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, his MsEE in Control Engineering (’97) from Hunan University, and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering (‘90) from Xiangtan Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Technology (now Hunan Institute of Engineering).
Dr. Zhong has established himself in both energy systems and control with a myriad of patents, publications, awards, grants, and years of research. He has a strong record of funding that includes industrial and funding agencies along with clear success as a research collaborator and project leader.
A leading researcher, Dr. Zhong is recognized worldwide in both energy/power systems and control engineering. He has developed a bundle of innovative technologies to address fundamental challenges in smart grid integration and proposed the architecture for the next-generation smart grid based on the synchronization mechanism of synchronous machines, which standardizes the interface of all heterogeneous suppliers, including conventional power plants, renewable energy, electric vehicles and energy storage systems, and smart loads with the grid. As a result, future power systems could be operated autonomously and expanded organically. This architecture is now widely reported on Smartgrid.IEEE.org, Spectrum.IEEE.org, SmartGridNews.com and the US Science News Radio Network. His work on making power inverters behave like conventional synchronous generators garnered high honors like the 2009 Highly Commended IET Innovation Award 2009 and a Senior Research Fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Leverhulme Trust. He has also solved a series of fundamental problems about robust control of time-delay systems in the frequency domain.
He has extensive experiences in hardware such as AC and DC drives, PLCs, motors, microcomputers (Intel, Atmel, Motorola, Xilog, NEC and TI), and software such as 100KB objective code using assembly language, and 10,000 line using C language, and database and PowerBuilder. His current research focuses on developing fundamental understanding of power and energy systems and advanced control and systems theory to address challenging problems in various energy and power systems, including renewable energy, mircrogrids, smart grids, electric drives and electric vehicles, aircraft power systems, high-speed trains etc.
Along with five patents, Dr. Zhong has also authored or co-authored more than 140 publications on energy systems and control, including three research monographs, and 44 academic journal papers, 61 conference papers, and over 26 journal papers in Chinese. His research monograph entitled Control of Power Inverters in Renewable Energy and Smart Grid Integration (Wiley-IEEE Press, 2013) once made a No. 7 Amazon Best Seller in power generation and distribution. His fourth research monograph on next-generation smart grids is scheduled for publication by Wiley-IEEE Press in 2015.
Dr Zhong has a clear vision in globalization and has had work experiences in China, Israel, UK and US. He has established a strong collaborative network with partners from UK, US, China, Israel, Denmark, Singapore, Italy, France etc. His research has attracted the support of major international companies, including Rolls-Royce, National Grid, State Grid Corporation of China, ALSTOM, Siemens, Texas Instruments, National Instruments, OPAL RT and Yokogawa, as well as SMEs, including Turbo Power Systems, Power Systems Warehouse and add2 Ltd.
Dr. Zhong is a Senior Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Fellow of The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He also is the Vice Chair of International Federation Automatic Control Technical Committees 6.4 (Power and Energy Systems) and 2.2 (Linear Control Systems). Dr. Zhong is a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Power Electronics Society, United Kingdom representative for the European Control Association (EUCA), and Founding Director of both the Loughborough Centre in Control Engineering (2011-2012) and the EPSRC-funded Network for New Academics in Control Engineering (2007-2011). He serves on the University Technology Partnership (UTP) Board of Rolls-Royce Plc and the Scientific Advisory Board of the FREEDM Systems Center at North Carolina State University.
He is the Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, IEEE Access, IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics, European Journal of Control, and Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Society. Dr. Zhong has previously served on the International Program Committees of 22 conferences.
We welcome Professor Zhong to ECE, Armour College and IIT and thank the members of the search committee for their effort and commitment to a thorough, efficient, and successful process.
The search committee for the Max McGraw professorship was composed of Professors Alex Flueck, Ashfaq Khokhar, Zuyi Li, Ganesh Raman (Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering), Navid Sabbaghi (Stuart School of Business), Mohammad Shahidepour, John Shen and Geoffrey Williamson. Wanda Reder (Vice-President, S&C Electric Company) and Paul McCoy (Co-Founder and President, Trans-Elect) served as external search committee members. The chair of the search committee was Professor Jafar Saniee.
