Appendix C
Biographical Sketches of Committee Members
Robert Guenther, Chair, is the director of applied science at Duke University. From 1997 to 1999 he was the interim director of the Duke Free Electron Laser Laboratory. His affiliation with Duke University began in 1980 as an adjunct professor while he was working for the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO) as a physicist; later he became director of the ARO Physics Division. Prior to joining ARO, he was a physicist with the U.S. Army Missile Command and McDonnell Aircraft.
Steven A. Boggs is the director and a research professor at the Electrical Insulation Research Center at the University of Connecticut. He has also been serving as an adjunct associate professor at the University of Toronto Department of Electrical Engineering since 1991. Prior to joining the University of Connecticut in 1993, Dr. Boggs was both director of Engineering and Research at Underground Systems, Inc., and vice president of Chicago Condenser Corporation. At Underground Systems, Inc., he designed the high-temperature superconducting power cable now under Electric Power Research Institute-sponsored development by Pirelli and American Superconductor. During his 12 years, from 1974 to 1987, with the Research Division of Ontario Hydro, he conducted research in the area of solid dielectrics, thermal cable design, and SF6-insulated systems.
Mehrdad (Mark) Ehsani has been professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University (TAMU) since 1981 and director of its Texas Applied Power Electronics Center since 1992. He is also currently the director of the Advanced Vehicle Systems Research Program in the TAMU College of Engineering. His previous work experience was as a research engineer at Argonne National Laboratory and at the Fusion Research Center in Austin, Texas. His main areas of interest include power electronics, motor drives, electric and hybrid vehicles, energy storage systems, high-voltage direct current power transmission, and pulsed power systems.
Robert Lasseter is the director of the Power System Engineering Research Center-Wisconsin. He is also a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, working on a multimillion-dollar project focused on the integration of distributed technologies. Outside of academia, he has worked closely with a diverse range of companies in the power industry, including General Electric, Westinghouse, Los Angeles Power and Water, Ontario Hydro, Hydro-Quebec, Fornas Centrais Electricas, and Siemens. His research interests focus on the application of power electronics to utility systems and on technical issues that arise from the restructuring of the power utility system.
Balarama V. Murty is a principal research engineer with General Motors R&D Center. He has been with GM since 1979, conducting research and development in power electronics, drives systems and control. He is the chairman of the FreedomCAR Electrical & Electronics Technical Team, a colloborative effort between USCAR and Department of Energy, responsible for
developing low-cost electrical drives and power inverter modules. He was also the team leader for a similar activity on the GM/DOE Hybrid Propulsion System. He is an active member of the 42 V Innovation team at GM. He has held various faculty positions in Electrical Engineering Department at the the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, during a distinguished academic career till 1978, the last one being a Full Professor. He was a Visiting Scientist at the University of Manitoba, Canada during 1978-79. He was honored to be a Fellow of IEEE ‘for his contributions to automotive power electronics systems and electrical drives’. He has been a member of several committees of IEEE and a past vice president of Power Electronics Society during 1994-96.
William C. Nunnally is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Missouri in Columbia. From 1974 to 1985 he led research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and from 1985 to 1996 he taught at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he was also the director of the Applied Physical Electronics Research Center. He also consults for numerous groups, including the University of Texas Institute for Advanced Technology, Kaiser Electronics, American Advanced Technologies, and Science Applications International Corporation.
Michael Raleigh is a senior scientist with Advanced Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI) and a technical adviser in areas of pulsed power engineering and mechanical design. Prior to joining APTI in 1999, he was with Utron, Inc., as a principal investigator for hypervelocity gun research and programs applying pulsed power technology to refractory materials bonding and removal of coatings. He has also worked for General Dynamics Defense Systems; GT-Devices, a subsidiary of General Dynamics Land Systems; the Naval Research Laboratory; and the Federal Power Commission. He has a total of 27 years experience in the design and execution of experiments in the areas of interior ballistics, pulsed power, charged particle beam propagation, and plasma confinement, and diagnostic techniques associated with such experiments.