Prof. Alex Q. Huang of Texas ECE has been named the recipient of the 2020 IEEE PELS R. David Middlebrook Achievement Award.

The IEEE PELS R. David Middlebrook Achievement Award was established in 2011 to "honor an individual who is judged to have accomplished outstanding contribution in the technical field of power electronics, within one or more subfields such as modeling & control, design-oriented analysis, development, simulation and application of electronic devices, passive components, analog sensing, and power circuits for inverters, converters and motor drives in all power levels."

Dr. Alex Huang is the Dula D. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin. Dr. Huang is a world renowned expert of power semiconductor devices, power electronics, smart grid and renewable energy system. He has published more than 550 papers in journals and conferences, and is the inventor of more than 20 US patents including several patents on the Emitter turn-off (ETO) thyristor technology that received a prestigious R&D 100 award in 2003. Dr. Huang is also widely credited for his contribution in developing the Energy Internet concept and the Solid State Transformer (SST) based Energy Router technology. His work on the SST has been named by MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s 10 most important emerging technologies in 2011. He has graduated more than 80 Ph.D. students and master students. Dr. Huang is a fellow of IEEE and the general chair of IEEE ECCE Conference in 2012. He is also a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Dr. Huang is the recipient of 2019 IEEE IAS Gerald Kliman Innovator Award.