Power electronics expert Minjie Chen receives outstanding young engineer award from IEEE society
By Office of Engineering Communications
Minjie Chen, a leader in making power electronic systems more compact and energy efficient, has received the Richard M. Bass Outstanding Young Power Electronics Engineer Award from the IEEE Power Electronics Society. The international award is given each year to a power electronics engineer under 35 years of age.
Chen, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, was recognized for his “contributions to the modeling, design, and application of high-performance power electronic systems.” Power electronics convert and deliver electricity from the grid for use in devices ranging from household appliances to smart grid technologies. Chen has emerged as a rising leader in the field, designing and developing devices that are both smaller and more energy efficient than existing electronics. His innovations have unlocked critical advances for meeting the rising energy demands and space limitations of data centers, renewable energy, and the smart grid.
Past work in Chen’s lab has yielded a technology that can increase power delivery density to microprocessors by 10 times over current state-of-the-art systems. Another device developed in Chen’s lab is eight times lighter and seven times smaller — while being more energy efficient — than conventional power delivery systems for large-scale data storage servers.
Alongside collaborators at Princeton and Dartmouth College, Chen also recently released a large-scale, open-source database called MagNet that allows researchers to accelerate the design process of power electronics using machine learning tools. Chen and his collaborators are currently organizing the IEEE PELS-Google-Tesla-MagNet Challenge, an international power magnetics modeling competition based on the MagNet database.
Chen joined the Princeton faculty in 2017. He holds a Ph.D. and S.M. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, as well as a B.S. in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University. Past honors include the Lawrence Keyes, Jr. / Emerson Electric Co. Junior Faculty Award from Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, an NSF CAREER Award, and five IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Prize Paper Awards.
This story originally appeared on the Electrical and Computer Engineering website.
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