Nanpeng Yu, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the Technical Prize Paper Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Power and Energy Society (PES). The Award Plaque, which is signed by the President of the IEEE PES Society, was presented to Prof. Nanpeng Yu and his Ph.D. students (Wei Wang, Yuanqi Gao, Jie Shi) for their highly influential journal paper “Safe Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Volt-VAR Control in Power Distribution Systems”. The journal paper was published in IEEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, which is the top venue in the power and energy field. This award was granted in July 2022 by the IEEE PES Society’s Technical Committee on Power System Operations, Planning & Economics through an annual selection process. Each year, one technical paper is selected to receive this award based on its theoretical innovation and broader impacts in electric power systems. 

Nanpeng Yu is the director of the Energy, Economics, and Environment (E3) Research Center at University of California, Riverside (UCR). As a Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI, Prof. Yu has been awarded over $16 Million of research funding from numerous federal and state agencies, as well as industry partners since he joined UCR. He and his graduate students have received multiple Best Paper Awards from various IEEE technical conferences. The technologies developed by Professor Yu has been adopted by over a dozen public and private energy companies in North America.