UT ECE professor Alexis Kwasinski has been named a 2011 recipient of an IBM Faculty Innovation Award. The IBM Innovation Awards is a worldwide program designed to encourage proposals that focus on teaching, research, or community building using key technologies.
Dr. Alexis Kwasinski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.
He received the electrical engineering degree from the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology (ITBA) in 1993. He earned the M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2005 and 2007, respectively. He also earned a graduate specialization degree in telecommunications from the University of Buenos Aires in 1997.
From 1993 to 1997, he worked for Telefónica of Argentina designing and planning telephony outside plant networks. From 1997 to 2002 he was involved with telecommunication power plants, working for Lucent Technologies Power Systems (now Tyco Electronics Power Systems), as a technical support engineer and sales technical consultant in Latin America. Between 1999 and 2002 he was also a part-time instructor in charged of ITBA’s telecommunications laboratory. Alexis Kwasinski is also participating in entrepreneurial endeavors related with microgrid applications.
In 2009, Dr. Kwasinski was awarded the NSF CAREER award. In 2005, he received the Joseph J. Suozzi INTELEC Fellowship. He also received the best technical paper award during INTELEC 2007. Dr. Kwasinski is a member of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society and the Eta Kappa Nu electrical engineering honor society. In 1994–1995 he was a member of the executive committee of the Argentine Electrotechnical Association and during the 2005–2006 academic year, he was chair of the IEEE PELS/PES joint student chapter at UIUC.
Dr. Kwasinski’s research interests are in the broad areas of power electronics, energy conversion, and electromechanical systems, with emphasis on distributed generation (microgrids), nonlinear power electronics controls, efficient electrical energy conversion and storage, renewable and alternative energy, ultra-reliable and fault-tolerant power systems, and motor drives. He is also interested in analyzing the effects of natural disasters on critical power infrastructure, such as communication networks power supply, and studying ways of reducing the vulnerability of these critical power infrastructures to such severe events.
