Professor Michael Tse Chi-kong, Associate Vice-President (Strategic Research) and Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering at City University of Hong Kong (CityU), has become the first academic in China to be awarded the IEEE CASS Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award 2022.

It is the most prestigious award for researchers in the field of circuits and systems within the field of electrical engineering. 

Professor Tse was chosen as this year’s recipient for his “outstanding contributions and continued leadership to the development of research in complex behaviour of power electronics and energy systems”.

The award is given to the outstanding and influential researchers within the technical scope of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS), which is one of the largest societies under the umbrella of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Professor Tse said that winning the award was hugely encouraging for him, his teams and for CityU research in general, especially in the field of power electronics and energy systems. 

“CASS is particularly competitive because its scope is relatively wide, and the recipient selected each year may be in some hot research sub-fields within the scope of CASS like microelectronics, signal processing, etc,” he said.

He added that the award serves as a firm endorsement of the research direction that he and his collaborators and partners have taken over the past quarter of a century, which began with work on the complexity or complex nonlinear behaviour of power electronics in the 1990s and was later extended to energy systems. 

“My earliest work in the field appeared in the IEEE CASS journal in back 1994, and this was the very first discovery of chaotic behaviour in an important class of power electronics systems, and since then I have led the development of this field,” he said.

In addition to this latest award, Professor Tse has won Best Paper Prizes from IEEE and other journals, the Grand Prize and Gold Medal with Jury’s Commendation in Silicon Valley International Invention Festival in 2019, and the Gold Medal with Jury’s Commendation at the International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva in 2009 and 2013.

Past recipients of the IEEE CASS Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award include eminent researchers based at North American and European universities, making Professor Tse’s achievement a significant reflection of the quality of research conducted at CityU.

“CityU has earned an exceptionally good reputation in power electronics, and our group is the leader in complex behaviour research in power electronics and energy systems, which refers to the entire system covering power generation with power renewable sources, delivery and storage,” Professor Tse said, paying tribute to all his current and former collaborators, students, postdocs and overseas collaborators for their invaluable contributions. 

“This award truly recognises our work on the impact of complexity research in power electronics and energy systems, especially at CityU,” he said.