Dr. Qing-Chang Zhong, an IEEE Fellow and IET Fellow, holds the Max McGraw Endowed Chair Professor in Energy and Power Engineering and Management at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA. He is well recognized worldwide as one of the very few leading experts in control, power electronics, and power systems, being appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer of three IEEE Societies (Control Systems Society, Power Electronics Society, and Power and Energy Society), and an Associate Editor of seven flagship journals in control and power electronics, including IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, IEEE Trans. on Power Electronics, and IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics.
Dr. Zhong is also truly globalized. He previously held positions in the UK (the Chair Professor in Control and Systems Engineering at University of Sheffield, the Chair Professor in Control Engineering at Loughborough University, Senior Lecturer at University of Liverpool, Senior Lecturer/Reader at University of Glamorgan, Postdoctoral Researcher at Imperial College London), Israel (Postdoctoral Fellow at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology) and China (Assistant Lecturer at Xiangtan Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Technologies). Before joining Illinois Institute of Technology, he was the Chair Professor in Control and Systems Engineering at The University of Sheffield, UK, where he built up a $5M+ research lab dedicated to the control of energy and power systems and attracted the support of Rolls-Royce, National Instruments, Texas Instruments, Siemens, ALSTOM, Turbo Power Systems, Chroma, Yokogawa, OPAL-RT etc.
Dr. Zhong is a dedicated educator. Two of his four graduated Chinese Ph.D. students received the Chinese National Award for Outstanding Students Abroad and one of them received the Grand Prize. Only two Ph.D. students in the UK had received the Grand Prize before 2017.
Dr. Zhong’s current research focuses on advanced control theory, power electronics and the seamless integration of both to address fundamental challenges in various energy and power systems. He (co-)authored four research monographs, including Power Electronics-Enabled Autonomous Power Systems: Next Generation Smart Grids (WileyIEEE Press, 2019), Control of Power Inverters in Renewable Energy and Smart Grid Integration (WileyIEEE Press, 2013), and Robust Control of Time-delay Systems (Springer, 2006). He solved a series of fundamental theoretical problems about robust control of time-delay systems. He is the lead inventor of virtual synchronous machines and proposed the SYNDEM (meaning synchronized and democratized) grid architecture, together with three technical routes, for next-generation smart grids based on the synchronization mechanism of synchronous machines. This unifies the interface of all different players — such as wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, energy storage systems and the majority of loads — with the grid so that they can play the same role as conventional power plants to maintain system stability, enhance system resiliency, and reduce the chance of large-scale blackouts. This line of research has been featured as a cover story by IEEE Power Electronics Magazine. In 2016 alone, he had 30 journal papers accepted/published (20 papers in IEEE Transactions). In total, he has 200+ papers.
Dr. Zhong was educated at Imperial College London (Ph.D., 2004, awarded the Best Doctoral Thesis Prize), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (Ph.D., 2000), Hunan University (MSc, 1997), and Hunan Institute of Engineering (Diploma, 1990). He served as a Senior Research Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Trust, UK (2009–2010), the UK Representative to the European Control Association, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of US NSF FREEDM Systems Center at North Carolina State University and the Rolls-Royce UTP Board in Power Electronics Systems. He also served as grant reviewers for funding bodies from UK, China, Singapore, Finland, Kuwait, Italy, Netherlands, Israel, and other countries.
