Industry Highlights
Annual Industry Day
and NSF / DOE Site Visit
The 5th Annual Industry Day and NSF / DOE Site
Visit was held on Nov. 15th-17th, 2016 at the Crowne
Plaza in downtown Knoxville, TN. This is the first
time the Crowne Plaza has been the venue for this
event and it seemed like a good fit. The weather held
for the event as well and attendees were treated to
mostly clear skies and warmer than usual November
temperatures.
Industry Day and the Site Visit saw CURENT host
approximately 250 members of industry, faculty and
students from the four CURENT partner schools, in-
vited speakers, other guests and the NSF / DOE Site
Visit Team. On Industry Day, invited industry leaders
spoke about their work and CURENT students gave
presentations on their research. Invited speakers
were Zhiwei Wang, President of GEIRI North Amer-
ica; Jose Conto, Principal, Dynamic Studies System
Planning for ERCOT; David Schoenwald, Principal
Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Labo-
ratories; Clifton Black, Senior Research Engineer
at Southern Company; and Jeff Hildreth, Principal
Engineer at Bonneville Power Administration. “It’s an
honor to have speakers of this caliber at our event,”
said Tom King, Director of Innovation and Industry,
“We respect the knowledge and expertise they bring
to our conference and our students gain a lot from
the interactions.”
Above: Approximately 250 people attended our 5th year site visit
The dates for this year’s site visit have been
finalized and they are Nov. 14-16. Tues., Nov. 14 will be
Industry Day and Wed., Nov. 15 and Thur., Nov. 16 will
be the NSF / DOE Site Visit. We have sent a “Save
the Date” and will be sending further details soon.
Please plan to join us.
During the Site Visit the next day, faculty gave re-
search updates and then the site visit team and inter-
ested industry members toured the CURENT head-
quarters and laboratories. The lab tour consisted of
the hardware testbed, the largescale testbed, the
FNet lab, the power electronics lab, the high power
electronics lab and the visualization room. After the
lab tour, the group attended a student poster ses-
sion, which consisted of over 100 research posters.
Despite conflicting industry conferences, we had one
of the largest groups of industry attendees so far.
The event was quite successful and we received a
great deal of positive feedback about the Center and
iour laboratories and research projects.
Above: Dr. Joe Chow and Dr. Peter Sauer (CURENT Scientific
Advisory Board) discuss during a break
11
CURENT Newsletter
Spring 2017
Above: Dr. Costinett addresses the audience during
education presentation
Above: Dr. Fred Wang in the Visualization Room during the lab tour