R. David Middlebrook Achievement Award

For contributions to control and topology development for high-performance power conversion.

Keyue Smedley (Fellow, IEEE) received her B.S. (1982) and M.S. (1985) degrees from Zhejiang University (China) in 1982 and 1985, respectively, and her Ph.D. from Caltech (USA) in 1991, all in electrical engineering. She is currently a Professor in EECS at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) (USA) and the Founder/Director of the UCI Power Electronics Lab since 1992.

Dr. Smedley was the chief designer of magnet power converters for all accelerator rings at DOE Superconducting Super Collider Lab in the early 1990s. She is also a co-founder of One-Cycle Control, Inc., which commercializes her invention of the One-Cycle Control (OCC) method. Initially groundbreaking in high-fidelity audio applications during the 1990s, OCC later unified four-quadrant control of single and three-phase power converters in the early 2000s. Today, OCC technology is widely applied across various market sectors, including professional audio, renewables, storage, power quality, grid stabilization, and defense.

In the late 2000s, her team invented the Hexagram multilevel converter. Her team also put the first fault current limited on the US grid for demonstration in the 2010s and made breakthroughs in full-range gain control of resonant switched-capacitor converters in the early 2020s.

Dr. Smedley’s research has yielded over 200 publications, over 15 US and international patents, two startup companies, and wide industry acceptance. She has received numerous recognitions, including the UCI Innovation Award in 2005 and a DOD Achievement Award from the Pentagon in 2010 with OCC, Inc. She has been a PELS Distinguished Lecturer since 2021.