ECE graduate student Patrick Doody received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship for 2008. Each year NSF offers about 1,000 fellowships nationwide to provide graduate students with up to $40,000 annual support for three years.

Doody is developing a set of metrics to analyze the variability of wind power. This is a particularly timely field of study. Department of Energy policy is for 30% of the nation's energy to be produced by renewable sources by 2030. Wind power is by far the cheapest renewable energy source, but suffers because of it's intermittent nature.

Doody's research focuses on quantifying the wind's variability and determining better wind farm locations—both in terms of typical wind behavior and in terms of balancing that behavior in a grid to ensure, as much as possible, consistent power. Doody studies in Professor Surya Santoso’s Laboratory for Advanced Studies in Electric Power and Integration of Renewable Energy Systems.