Mona Ghassemi named Steven O. Lane Junior Faculty Fellow
Mona Ghassemi, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named the Steven O. Lane Junior Faculty Fellow of Electrical and Computer Engineering by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
The Steven O. Lane Junior Faculty Fellowship was endowed in 2004 through donations made in memory of the late Steven O. Lane, a 1978 graduate of Virginia Tech who was considered to be a leader in spacecraft antenna design. He spent his entire professional career with Boeing Satellite Systems; among his many accomplishments were 12 patents and several professional papers. The fellowship is presented to a junior faculty member for teaching and research excellence and is held for three years.
A member of the Virginia Tech faculty since 2017, Ghassemi’s scholarship focuses on electromagnetics and its application to dielectric insulators for the power industry. Her research has resulted in 75 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. In 2020, she has received the National Science Foundation CAREER award and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Research Program award. In total, she has received research awards of $7 million with her personal share being $3.96 million where she is the principal investigator for $2.35 million.
In addition, Ghassemi’s work has received four best paper awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Power and Energy Society General Meeting, the IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Expo, and the 25th and 26th International Power Systems conferences.
She is an at-large member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation Society (DEIS) for 2020–23, a corresponding member of the IEEE Conference Publication Committee (CPC) of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES), an Active Member of several CIGRE working groups and the IEEE Task Forces, and a member of the Education Committee of the IEEE DEIS and PES.
Additionally, she has been a senior member of IEEE since 2016 and a Professional Engineer since 2015. She is the associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, IET High Voltage, International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education, and Power Electronic Devices and Components, Elsevier. Furthermore, she is a guest editor in Energies and received the 2020 Contribution Award from the High Voltage journal.
Before coming to Virginia Tech, Ghassemi was a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada/Hydro-Quebec postdoctoral fellow at the University of Quebec from 2013 to 2015 and a postdoctoral fellow at the Electrical Insulation Research Center at the University of Connecticut from 2015 to 2017.
Ghassemi received the Master of Science and Ph.D. (both with Hons.) in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran in 2007 and 2012, respectively.
