Three engineers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have recently been elevated to senior membership in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE. Researchers receiving the honor include Radha Krishna Moorthy and Namwon Kim in the Grid Systems Architecture group, and Jongchan Choi in the Grid Research Modeling and Controls group.
This highest level of IEEE membership, awarded by peers for technical and professional excellence, is reserved for only the roughly 10% of members who have made the most significant contributions to the engineering field over time.
Krishna Moorthy, who joined ORNL in 2019, focuses predominantly on grid modernization concepts such as solid-state power substation technologies and intelligent grid systems. She uses both simulation and hardware to validate grid system architectures and frameworks for novel automated communications and controls. Krishna Moorthy won a 2024 ORNL R&D Innovation Award for one of her solid state power substation patents. She also received a best paper award at the 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems.
Kim, an ORNL researcher since 2022, specializes in design and control of power electronics converters and controls for grid integration applications, such as energy storage and electric vehicle charging. Kim’s expertise has been shared in 40 peer-reviewed publications. In 2024, he was named an outstanding reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy and won a best paper award from the IEEE Industry Applications Society.
Choi, who came to ORNL in 2020 as a postdoctoral research associate, is now a staff researcher who focuses on electromagnetic transient modeling, AI-based modeling and grid monitoring for power transmission/distribution grids, and simulation of large-scale grids that extensively incorporate power electronics. Choi is serving as a committee Track Chair for Power Electronics and Energy Conversion at the 2025 IEEE Annual Conference of Industrial Electronics Society.
The new IEEE senior members are staff of the ORNL’s Electrification and Energy Infrastructures Division, affiliated with the Grid Research Innovation and Development Center, or GRID-C.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
