ECE Professor Domínguez-García and Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Information Trust Institute, has received dual honors. He became the Inaugural M. Stanley Helm Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering as of August 2023, to be invested on March 25, 2024, was recognized by IEEE for his contributions to distributed control and uncertainty analysis of electrical energy systems, and elevated to IEEE Fellow on January 1, 2023. This prestigious honor is reserved for IEEE members with extraordinary technical accomplishment in an IEEE field of interest.
Domínguez-García’s research focuses on providing a reliable and efficient energy supply in our changing world with an electricity infrastructure being transformed and driven by the integration of new technologies and renewable energy sources. In his research on uncertainty analysis, Alejandro’s team develops mathematical frameworks to quantify the impact of random events on power system reliability. Renewable energy systems are a good example: uncertainty analysis can help predict how variations in solar and wind power will affect your energy system. Another example is transmission line failures, which can jeopardize system operational reliability.
Professor M. Stanley Helm’s (1911-2003) affiliation and dedication to the power engineering program at Illinois spanned more than 70 years. After earning his bachelor’s (1933) and master’s (1934) degrees in electrical engineering at Illinois, he worked for Illinois Power and Midstate Electric Company, and then at Clemson University and Illinois, fulfilling his calling to teaching. For the next six decades, Helm inspired several generations of electrical engineering students. He co-authored a textbook, Circuit Analysis by Laboratory Methods and received the professional degree in electrical engineering in 1950. At a time when other universities were abandoning their power engineering programs in the 1960s and ’70s, Helm played a key role in preserving the Illinois Program.
As a researcher, Helm made significant contributions to the field now known as power quality. Although he retired in 1982, he continued to make valuable contributions to the Electrical & Computer Alumni Association Advisory Board where he served for 15 years.
This article was excerpted from a Grainger College of Engineering 8/7/2023 news article by Eleanor Wyllie, from Alejandro’s home page, and from a plaque honoring M. Stanley Helm.