Dr. Thomas
Jahns
1999 William E. Newell Power
Electronics Award Recipient
Dr. Thomas M. Jahns (M'78-SM'91-F'93) received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees, all in electrical engineering, from MIT where he completed his studies in 1978. He joined GE Corporate Research and Development (GE-CRD), Schenectady, NY, in 1983 where he pursued new power electronics and adjust-able- speed machine drive technology for fif-teen years. His technical efforts at GE in-cluded pioneering work in the development of interior permanent magnet (IPM) syn-chronous machine drives for high-perfor-mance applications including machine tools and aerospace surface actuators.
Dr. Jahns served as a senior project manager for several years at GE leading large interdisciplinary R&D projects to de-velop new machine drive technology for a wide range of commercial and military ap-plications extending from household appliances to aircraft generators. These major development initiatives included a new generation of large industrial ac drives for process lines and low-cost brushless permanent magnet motor drives for commercial/residential applications. Dr. Jahns earned eleven US patents during his industrial career.
During 1997-98, Dr. Jahns was granted a two-year research sabbatical at MIT where he pursued research activities in the area of advanced automotive electrical systems and accessories. Working closely with Prof. John Kassakian, he served as co-director of an international industrial consortium of automakers and automotive suppliers focused on investigating the introduction of higher volt-ages into the next generation of automotive electrical systems. The work of this consortium has been instrumental in establishing 42 Vdc as the unofficial inter-national standard for future high-power automotive electrical accessories.
In October 1998, Dr. Jahns joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Grainger Professor of Power Electronics in the Department of Elec-trical and Computer Engineering. At UW-Madison he is an Associate Director of the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium (WEMPEC), an international consortium of approximately sixty companies and institutions. He is also undertaking an active role in the new Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES) funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) where he is leading the research thrust focused on development of integrated power electronic modules (IPEMs).
Dr. Jahns has been active in IEEE professional activities throughout his ca-reer. His service to PELS includes APEC General Chair (1992), PELS Meetings Committee Chair (1993-94), At-Large AdCom member (1992-94), and PELS President (1995-96). He has also been a member of the Industry Applications Society (IAS) Executive Board for the past seven years, where he is now leading a committee aimed at improving inter-society cooperation within IEEE. Dr. Jahns was elected to IEEE Fellow grade in 1993. He has been recognized as a Distin-guished Lecturer by IEEE-IAS for 1994-95, and by IEEE-PELS in 1998-99. Dr. Jahns presently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife, Peg, and two children.