Smedley Receives Power Electronics Achievement Award
July 11, 2024 - The IEEE Power Electronics Society has honored Keyue Smedley with the 2024 R. David Middlebrook Achievement Award for her “contributions to control and topology development for high-performance power conversion.” This recognition is the highest technical achievement award presented by the IEEE Power Electronics Society and honors an individual who is judged to have accomplished outstanding contributions to the field of power electronics.
“I’m happy to receive this award for doing what I love,” said Smedley, professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “My appreciation goes to my students, scholars, collaborators and family, whose continuous support and inspiration made this possible.”
She is world-renowned for her pioneering work in power electronics, particularly for inventing the one-cycle control (OCC) method, a patented technology to enable ultrafast and precise power conversion. Smedley was the chief designer of magnet power converters for all accelerator rings at the Department of Energy Superconducting Super Collider Lab in the early 1990s. Initially groundbreaking in high-fidelity audio applications at the time, OCC later unified four-quadrant control of single and three-phase power converters in the early 2000s.
Smedley is a co-founder of One-Cycle Control, Inc. a company that commercializes OCC technology. Today, this method is widely applied across various market sectors, including professional audio, renewables, storage, power quality, grid stabilization and defense. Her team also invented the Hexagram multilevel converter in the late 2000s, put the first fault current limiter on the U.S. grid for demonstration in the 2010s, and demonstrated that fast and precise control of the power grid is possible during the same period. Recently, her team has made breakthroughs in full-range gain control of resonant switched-capacitor converters, opening the doors for magnetic-less power conversion for wide applications.
Professor Smedley earned bachelor’s (1982) and master’s (1985) degrees in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Caltech in 1991. Her research has yielded more than 200 publications, 15 U.S. and international patents, two startup companies and broad industry acceptance.
She has received numerous recognitions, including the UCI Innovation Award in 2005, IEEE Fellow in 2008 and a DOD Achievement Award from the Pentagon in 2010 with OCC, Inc. She has been an IEEE Power Electronics Society Distinguished Lecturer since 2021.
– Lori Brandt
