The Future Power Engineering Professor

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The Future Power Engineering Professor

• Vijay Vittal
• Iowa State University

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Setting

• Power educators face a number of challenges in
  their home departments
• The electrical engineering discipline has become
  intensely competitive
• Technology explosion and demand in emerging areas
  have placed tremendous pressures on more
  established areas like electric power engineering
  and control systems

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Setting

• Established and more mature sub-disciplines have
  to compete effectively and aggressively to
  sustain faculty positions in these areas
• In order to justify faculty positions at major
  universities, vibrant research programs in these
  areas are essential

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Setting

• University administrators invariably tie faculty
  slots to the ability of an area to attract
  significant amounts of external research funding
• This establishes a steady flow of graduate
  students and leads to new discoveries and
  inventions
• A well established graduate program in a
  particular discipline plays a key role in
  attracting undergraduate students to that
  discipline and in sustaining course work and
  interest in that particular discipline

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Setting

• Today at any major university it is not possible
  to sustain a viable undergraduate program in
  electric power without having a productive
  research program

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Requirements for Future Power Engineering
Professor

• The future power engineering professor will have
  to strike the right balance between research and
  teaching
• The faculty members will also have to develop
  depth in areas associated with their expertise
  and breadth in terms of ability to assimilate and
  apply support disciplines to the problems in
  electric power engineering

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Requirements for Future Power Engineering
Professor-Teaching Aspects

• Faculty members would also have to teach
  traditional power engineering curricula together
  with the introduction of advances in technology
  and tools in the field
• New pedagogy and teaching techniques would also
  have to be introduced
• Distance education would also be a key component
  of teaching responsibilities

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Requirements for Future Power Engineering
Professor-Research Aspects

• There is a definite need for building effective
  research consortia across departments within
  their own university, and across different
  universities
• Future faculty should also have the ability to
  seamlessly shift focus and work at the
  intersection of several disciplines that relate
  to power engineering as the field evolves and
  adapts newer technologies

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Related Disciplines

• Current developments in our field borrow from new
  developments in a number of associated
  sub-disciplines
• control theory
• applied mathematics
• economics
• probability theory and risk analysis
• computer engineering
• software engineering
• data structures
• electronics
• sensor technology

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Related Disciplines

• Further enhancements in technology will occur at
  the intersection of power engineering with these
  associated sub-disciplines
• Future faculty will have to adapt to new concepts
  and ideas
• Future power faculty will greatly benefit by
  having depth and grounding in power engineering
  fundamentals, and by having breadth in one or
  more of the associated sub-disciplines

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Related Disciplines

• To reinforce this idea let us look at a few
  examples of related disciplines that have made an
  impact on the power area
• Market Mechanisms and Design
• Design and Analysis of FACTS Controllers
• Wide Area Measurements
• Intelligent Electronic Devices

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Enhancing Teaching Content and Techniques

• Our Curricula should keep pace with the new
  developments in power engineering
• Students in our area should have a solid
  grounding in basic power engineering fundamentals
  
• In order to keep pace with the changes and teach
  basic fundamentals power engineering programs
  require a critical mass to share responsibilities

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Enhancing Teaching Content and Techniques

• In many U.S. universities, the power engineering
  faculty numbers have reduced to a single person
• Maintaining and teaching a modern curriculum in
  power engineering is a challenge
• Future power engineering educators would have to
  use a variety of sources to develop and teach
  relevant courses

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Enhancing Teaching Content and Techniques

• Shared resources such as web based material,
  multi-media, and streaming video lectures from
  more established power engineering programs
• Young faculty members in the future would also
  have to shoulder the burden of quickly
  establishing viable research programs in order to
  compete with colleagues in other disciplines
  within their own department

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Enhancing Teaching Content and Techniques

• One such example of a shared resource for course
  development is provided by POWERLEARN -
  http//powerlearn.org
• Individual modules in electric power engineering
  that can be assembled to form an entire course
• Future faculty members would also have to
  appropriately guide their graduate students to
  consider a breadth of courses or appropriate
  minors in the sub-disciplines described earlier

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Forming Effective Research Teams and Consortia

• Future faculty members will have to sustain
  active and productive research programs
• Future professors would have to effectively team
  with faculty in other universities to compete for
  research funding

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Forming Effective Research Teams and Consortia

• Formation of research teams and consortia would
  provide the flexibility of forming teams with a
  variety of complementary skills
• This would provide the ability to compete for
  large initiatives that call for multi-dimensional
  teams with expertise in a range of areas
• One such example of an initiative is the recent
  NSF/ONR EPNES initiative

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Forming Effective Research Teams and Consortia

• Forming research consortia to tackle
  multi-disciplinary research at the leading edge
  is also essential to guide power engineering into
  newer directions and to offer fresh insights into
  the field
• An excellent example of such efforts was
  demonstrated in the EPRI/DoD effort on Complex
  Interactive Networks and Systems Initiative
• Researchers with diverse backgrounds and from
  multiple universities formed teams to tackle
  complex problems

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Forming Effective Research Teams and Consortia

• In the future such efforts would be invaluable in
  sustaining power programs and bringing together
  researchers with complementary backgrounds

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Summary

• Future faculty will face immense challenges in
  offering diverse courses, attracting students,
  competing for research funding, and tackling new
  research directions
• They will have to develop breadth in terms of
  cross cutting disciplines that will help advance
  the research frontier in power engineering

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Summary

• Future faculty would have to use diverse
  resources to offer relevant courses and keep the
  curricula current
• Their efforts in seeking research funding would
  be significantly enhanced by forming effective
  research consortia with researchers in other
  schools