Chakrabortty Receives NSF Career Award

Dr. Aranya Chakrabortty, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation to support his research on power grids.

The NSF Career Award, one of the highest honors for young faculty in science and engineering, will provide $400,000 in funding over five years to support Chakrabortty’s research project, “Wide-Area Control of Large Power Systems Using Distributed Synchrophasors: Where Network Theory Meets Power System Dynamics.”

Chakrabortty’s research will develop the mathematical foundations for tracking and controlling the dynamic behavior of large electric power grids so that catastrophes such as blackouts and voltage collapse can be prevented.  He will disseminate his results through educational field trips, conference tutorials and workshops with invited speakers from the Research Triangle Park. The project will generate research opportunities for minority engineering students via the NSF Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) Systems Center headquartered at NC State.

Chakrabortty earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Jadavpur University in India. He received master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.