EnergyAustralia Chair of Power Engineering
The University of Sydney
Australia

Vassilios G. Agelidis is currently professor at the University of Sydney, Australia holding the EnergyAustralia chair of power engineering. Since July 2007 he is also the director of the Electrical and Information Engineering Foundation.

Professor Agelidis graduated from Democritus University of Thrace, Greece with a bachelor of electrical engineering (first class honours, five years of study) in 1988. He obtained a master of applied science from Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1992 with a thesis on the zero-voltage DC-bus “notch” commutated pulse-width modulated inverter topology and other efficient high-frequency dc-dc converters. He gained his Ph.D. Degree from Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia in 1997 for contributions to optimised inverter control methods based on pulse-width modulation strategies including multilevel converter topologies. Professor Agelidis was awarded the graduate diploma of business (GradDipBus) from the Curtin Graduate School of Business, Perth, Australia in 2000 and also holds a graduate certificate of education (GradCertEd) from Curtin University of Technology (1994).

Prior to his current appointment, he held the inaugural chair of power engineering at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia (2005-06). Professor Agelidis also worked at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom as the research manager of the Centre for Economic Renewable Power Delivery (CERPD, 2000-04) and Curtin University of Technology (1993-99) initially as an associate lecturer and then as a lecturer and prior to leaving for the UK as a senior lecturer.

Professor Agelidis leads research in the general area of power engineering and electricity grid technologies as well as power electronics. His most significant research contributions so far have been in the field of power-electronic energy conversion, with the goal of achieving more efficient energy use through motor control and electrical energy processing. He has reported design methods of advanced equipment for electrical utilities able to support a ‘smarter’ grid infrastructure based on fast automated electronic control. In the area of sustainable energy systems, his work includes grid integration techniques of distributed generation based on solar and wind energy converters through electronics and more economic DC transmission technologies using voltage-source converters. He is an associate research member, under the energy stream, of the newly established Institute for Sustainable Solutions at the University of Sydney (July 2008). In 2004, he received the UK’s most prestigious research fellowship for a young researcher, the advanced research fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. His research involves collaborations with various companies and government organisations and many universities worldwide. Specifically, Professor Agelidis has an active research and development program with ABB AB corporate research of Sweden on advanced transmission and power system control technologies. He also works on research projects with many companies including EnergyAustralia, NEMMCO and other key organisations in Australia.

Professor Agelidis is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE, USA, 2000) and active within the organisation: elected member-at-large of the administrative committee of the Power Electronics Society (PELS) (2007-09); chair of the chapters committee of PELS (2003-05); associate editor of the IEEE Power Electronics Letters (2003-05); elected PELS Vice-President operations (2005-06). He is also a member of the UK’s Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET, formerly known as IEE, Institute of Electrical Engineers).

Dr Agelidis regularly acts as a technical committee member for many IEEE international conferences since 1994 (APEC, PESC, IECON and others). He has also been an executive and organising committee member of numerous IEEE international conferences: tutorial chair (PESC 2002); topic chair for inverter control technology (PESC 2004); publicity chair (PESC 2005); Vice-Chair (PESC 2007); technical chair (PESC 2008). He was a technical committee member of the 2006 IEE 8th international conference on AC and DC power transmission. Professor Agelidis reviews regularly for all IEEE and IET transactions journals related to power electronics, power delivery, energy conversion, renewable energy, and industry applications. Professor Agelidis has delivered seminars, tutorials and keynote addresses in IEEE and other international conferences.

Professor Agelidis is the author/co-author of several technical and professional publications and a postgraduate textbook entitled “Power electronic control in electrical systems” published by Newnes in 2002.

In 2007, he received an endeavour executive award from the Australian Government for a three-month visit to work with senior researchers at Seoul National University of Technology, South Korea on fuel-cell energy systems. Recently, Dr Agelidis has been invited to join the VESTAS visiting professor research program at Aalborg University, Denmark for a three-month period (2008-09) for research work on large offshore wind farm connections with the electricity grid.

Profile of Dr Kumudu Munasinghe

It is a great honour and privilege to be a recipient of the prestigious ARC Australian Postdoctoral (APD) Fellowship. As an early-career researcher, this award will pave the way for me to undertake research of national and international significance and enable me to establish as an independent researcher. The benefits of hosting my APD with the Wireless Networking Group (WiNG) at the School of Electrical and Information Engineering will help me to strengthen and continue existing partnerships with Prof. Abbas Jamalipour (who is also a Chief Investigator of this Discovery Project Grant), the WiNG members, and our international collaborators by using the available state-of-the-art research facilities.

My most significant research contributions were made during my Ph.D. research, which was funded by an ARC Linkage Project (LP0455209) in collaboration with SingTel Optus from 2005-2008. This was also conducted under the supervision of Prof. Abbas Jamalipour. My contribution to this project was the design and development of a mobility-aware novel architecture facilitating unified real-time session management for interworked heterogeneous mobile and wireless networks. As a result, it enabled a roaming user to seamlessly handoff sessions between different heterogeneous networks. Another significant contribution of this project was the proposal put forward for harmonizing two international mobile communication standards, i.e., the 3^rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard and the 3^rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2) standard.

The impact of this work has produced over 25 refereed publications, in journals that are ranked in the top 10 in telecommunications (according to JCR published by ISI) and in proceedings of the IEEE’s premier flagship conferences. In support of my research, I have been successful in securing many research grants such as: ARC Communications Research Network (ACoRN) grant for travel to WTS2008 conference to California, USA in April 2008 and the ACoRN grant for travel to ICC2007 conference to Scotland, UK in June 2007. I have also been very much privileged to receive several national and international awards such as the IEEE Student Award at GLOBECOM2007 at Washington DC, USA in November 2007, National ICT Australia (NICTA) Prize for Next Generation Applications (Telecoms) in Research Project Work, October 2007, and the NHP Electrical Engineering Prize for Productive Industry Collaboration in Research Project Work, October 2005 acknowledging my research excellence.

Further, I am also actively involved as a TPC member in several international conferences such as, IEEE ICC 2008, 2009, 2010 IEEE GLOBECOM 2008, 2009, 2010 and IEEE WCNC 2008, 2009, 2010, the Local Organizations Chair for WCNC 2010, and act as a technical reviewer for several prestigious international journals such as the IEEE Wireless Communications, IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Transactions in Wireless Communications, and IEEE Transactions in Vehicular Technology. My other professional activities involve in being an active Member of the IEEE and IEEE Computer Society, Member of the Satellite and Space Communications (SSC) Technical Committee, and a Member of the Australian Computer Society.