EECS Professor Elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering

Keyue Smedley recognized for contributions to electrical engineering

Keyue Ma Smedley, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering and computer science in The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine, has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE). 

Smedley's research focuses on electronic circuits for high current and high voltage power processing.   This is a critical area covering all electrical applications large and small, from cell phones to utility power grids.  Her groundbreaking work on one-cycle control led to professional audio amplifiers one-seventh the size of previous models with a ten-fold efficiency improvement in 1998, and a unified controller for three-phase AC-DC, DC/AC, harmonic filtering, and reactive power generation in 2003.  These inventions lay the groundwork for substantial improvements in efficiency, performance, the stability of power processing for power use, power generation, and power quality control to enable substantial reductions in the carbon footprint and raw material consumption.

Recently, Smedley’s research team has made another breakthrough in topology and control of medium-voltage power conversion with a circuit called a hexagram, which extends the operating range of commercially available semiconductor devices to megawatt power circuits.  The hexagram converter can be used to drive megawatt motors with high efficiency and high precision for manufacturing, transportation, and power plant applications.  Smedley continues to focus on power electronics for renewable power generation and modern grids to reduce the green house effect and fossil fuel consumption.

Smedley received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1982 and 1985 respectively, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1987 and 1991 respectively.  She is the founder and director of the UC Irvine Power Electronics Laboratory, a recipient of the UC Irvine Innovation Award 2005, and an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.  Smedley has published more than 100 technical articles and holds nine patents, most of which are licensed to corporate entities for commercialization.