The Future Power Engineering Professor

1. Vijay Vittal Iowa State University The Future Power Engineering Professor

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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