Transportation Electrification

Robert Spotnitz leads Battery Design LLC. He is a well-known speaker on various aspects of battery engineering. He has also participated in the start-up of two battery developers: American Lithium Energy Corporation and Enovix Corporation. Before Battery Design LLC, he was a Director at PolyStor where he led efforts to develop lithium-ion batteries for hybrid electric vehicles.

Dr. Mahesh Krishnamurthy received his MS in Electrical Engineering from the Missouri University of Science and Technology (formerly University of Missouri at Rolla) in 2004 and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2008. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and the director of the Electric Drives and Energy Conversion Lab and Grainger Power Electronics and Motor Drives Laboratory at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Before joining IIT, he worked as a Design Engineer at EF technologies in Arlington, Texas. His research primarily focuses on design, analysis and control of power electronics, electric machines and adjustable speed drives for automotive and renewable energy applications. Dr. Krishnamurthy is a Senior Member of IEEE and is the recipient of the 2006-2007 IEEE VTS- Transportation Electronics Fellowship Award. He is a distinguished lecturer with the IEEE-Vehicular Technology Society. He has co-authored over 60 scientific articles, book chapters and technical reports and has one US patent and three pending. He is the General Chair for the 2014 IEEE-Transportation Electrification Conference and Exposition. In the past, he has served as the Technical Program Chair for the 2011 Vehicle Power and Propulsion Conference and 2013 IEEE-Transportation Electrification Conference. Dr. Krishnamurthy has served as the Guest Editor or Associate Editor for several IEEE journals including the Special Section of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology on Sustainable Transportation Systems, Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics on Transportation Electrification and Vehicle Systems and Special Issue of IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics on Transportation Electrification. He is currently serving as the Publication Chair for IEEE’s Transportation Electrification Initiative.

Dr. James Gover, IEEE Life Fellow, is currently Professor Emeritus at Kettering University and teaches graduate courses on power semiconductors, advanced power electronics and fuel cell system integration and packaging. Dr. Gover was Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Kettering for fourteen years and served as Department Chair for three years. His research and teaching specialty at Kettering University was hybrid electric vehicles and the associated technologies. He was awarded the title of IEEE Fellow for his work in radiation effects.

Dr. Chris Mi is a fellow of IEEE, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, and the Director of the US DOE funded GATE Center for Electric Drive Transportation. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, all in electrical engineering. Previously he was an Electrical Engineer with General Electric Canada Inc. He was the President and the Chief Technical Officer of 1Power Solutions, Inc. from 2008 to 2011. He is the Co-Founder of Gannon Motors and Controls LLC and Mia Motors, Inc.

Dr. Fei Gao is currently an associate professor at the energy department of the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbeliard (UTBM), Belfort, France. He received respectively from UTBM the Master’s degree in electrical and control system engineering in 2007, and the PhD degree in renewable energy with distinguished youth doctor reward in 2010. His main research fields include fuel cells and their applications in transportation, multi-physical modeling and real time simulation systems. He is the head of the energy production division of department of Energy of UTBM, and the chair of fuel cell modeling axis of the Fuel Cell Research Federation (FR CNRS) in France. Since 2014, he is also appointed as adjunct lecture professor at School of Automation of the Northwestern Polytechnical University in China. He is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, IEEE Transactions on Transportation Electrification and editor of the IEEE Transportation Electrification Newsletter. He is elected in 2013 as Secretary (IEEE officer) of the Technical Committee on Automotive Technology (TCAT) of IEEE Industry Electronic Society (IES). He serves also as technical track chair and member of organizing committee in many IEEE international conferences (IECON, ITEC, APEC).