Acceptance Speech for the 2025 Distinguished Service Award from the IEEE Industry Application Society

I was honored with the 2025 IEEE Industry Application Society Distinguished Service Award at the 2025 ECCE conference in Philadelphia PA on October 23, 2025. This is a rewritten version of my speech.

I gave a short speech, even though it exceeded my 3-minute time limit, I felt compelled to relay my experience as a volunteer in the IEEE IAS to those in the audience who are just embarking on their journey as volunteers.

I received some heartfelt responses from many, and I felt that I had not adequately told my story. I decided to edit the speech to better present my thoughts on this volunteer journey through IEEE IAS, here is the version that resulted. I hope it retains the extemporaneous feel of the speech while also more adequately express my thoughts.

Here is a video of the original speech, courtesy of Prof. Andy Knight at University of Calgary.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9ctqxhmsvffvhavn8qds7/ECCE-2025-Luncheon-Speech-PW.MOV?rlkey=9fjtd6az2n0ykx548aaipldk7&dl=0

Thank you very much for this award, I am forever humbled and grateful.

I would like to first thank my nominator, Dr. Tomy Sebastian, Prof. Radu Bojoi, the awards committee chair for the IAS, the executive board of the IEEE IAS for considering my nomination, my colleagues and friends from the IEEE IAS who had shown me great love and support through the years, with a special shoutout to the Electric Machinery Committee, my home committee within the IEEE IAS.

It has been six years since I last attended an ECCE conference; as I entered the convention center yesterday, I once again felt the pull of the ECCE community welcoming me back into the fold, it felt like home. The reason I have been away for so long is because I am the primary care giver for my mother, who had just turned one hundred on October 6.

I want to give you the arc of my involvement in the IEEE IAS, I believe my personal journey and experience with the IEEE, and IAS in particular, is illustrative of the power and the importance of a technical community; most importantly, of the comradery intrinsic in an organization as diverse and special as the IEEE IAS.

My father, a lifelong IEEE member, advised me after I had decided to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an electrical engineering major, to join the IEEE as soon as possible, that if I wished to accomplish anything within electrical engineering, I must join the professional society for electrical engineering, the IEEE. I took heed and I signed up to be an IEEE member during the second week of my freshmen year at the University of Illinois. I spent the first week of my freshmen year doing what 18-year-olds think going to college means: partaking in consuming much adult beverages.

Fast forward to my gradual school days, I call it gradual school because the pace of my progress through post graduate studies was indeed quite gradual. My advisor Prof. Teddy Pȕttgen and Prof. Tom Habetler encouraged me to submit a paper to the IEEE IAS Annual Meeting, which was accepted, much to my surprise and delight — the impostor syndrome had already worked its magic. It was the 1990 edition of the IAS AM, held in Seattle Washington. It was there that I faced the well-known gauntlet presented by the elder statesmen of the Electric Machines Committee: John Oldencamp and Herb Johnson. They were the gatekeepers for the EMC. Fortunately, they were both exceedingly kind and took it easy on me, a scared gradual student presenting at a major technical conference for the very first time. I had seen their modus operandi firsthand, and I was quite relieved that I had passed the gauntlet. It was after the talk that my friend Prof. Rene Spee put his arm around my shoulders and said: you’re in! He meant that I had survived the gauntlet; but to this day, I take it to mean that I had gained ascension into the rarified air of being a member of the EMC, since this is my story, I am sticking with it. It was a proud moment and it was also the realization that I had joined the people that I had fanboyed over as a gradual student, they were my heroes and role models. The perspective that these same people are now colleagues overwhelmed me. As it turned out, many of them would become mentors and trusted friends, even though I still fanboy to this day. As a newbie though, I was tempted to blurt out: I have read your papers, followed your work, and I even understood some of them! The membership in this group was both reassuring and nerve wracking, as the self-imposed pressure to uphold the excellence set by the community was both incessant and inspirational.

It was while I was working at the Emerson Motor Company after I graduated that I was able to volunteer for the IEEE IAS, to give back to the community that had welcomed me. My boss at Emerson was Jerry Lloyd, a stalwart of the EMC and IEEE IAS; during one of the EMC meetings, Jerry stood over me as the EMC secretary asked for volunteers for the session organizers, their task was to organize the following year’s meeting sessions, and Jerry loudly volunteered me for one of those organizer posts. I gulped and took the responsibility, not knowing what the job was, nor how I was supposed to fulfill that responsibility. This was before electronic submission sites and virtual handling of the papers, I had to disseminate each paper as submitted in brown envelopes by snail mail, distribute the copies amongst the volunteer reviewers, collect the results, nag the reviewers if necessary, adjudicate the decision, notify the authors of the decisions, identify a theme for the session, and put the papers in logical theme order and notify the technical programs committee. Luckily for me, Jerry not only volunteered me, but he also gave me time during work hours to work on this task, it meant that much to him. One of the many lessons I learned during this initial experience was to volunteer to be the session chair rather than the session organizer.

As I became more ingrained into the rhythm, or lack thereof, in an all-volunteer organization, I was approached by Dr. Bruno Lequesne to serve as the secretary of the EMC, an eight year term commitment: the secretary cycles through to the vice chair office for two years after serving as the secretary for two years, and then cycle to the chairperson office for two years. Finally, as the past chair for two years. In my eight years, I learned the ins and outs of dealing with conference programming and publications process flow for the EMC. It was an education that was unique and eye opening.

Just as I thought I was done with my EMC duties, Dr. Tomy Sebastian approached me to be the Publicity chair for the nascent 2009 Energy Conversion Conference and Exposition (ECCE). When I told Tomy that I knew nothing about publicity, he, in the more genteel and kind parlance of the day as compared to FAFO: learn how by doing, mess up, and re-do. One thing that made a distinct impression was how hard everyone — especially the Technical Programs Committee: Tom Jahn’s Dave Perrault, and Brian Welchko — worked to maintain the balance that Tomy required: there is no PELS, there is no IAS, there is just ECCE. That motto was critical to the establishment of the initial ECCE and all the subsequent ECCE conferences.

After the initial success of the ECCE, Prof. Tom Habetler once again came into the arc of my story by asking me to be the co-chair of the Technical Program Committee along with Prof. John Shen. Note that there were only two of us stepping into the impossibly large shoes of the inaugural triumvirate. We followed their process, considered and compared all the papers in all tracks fairly and equally, even though we placed great value on the suggestions of the track chairs, which made the difficult decisions between accepting and rejecting papers.

Dr. Sebatian then asked me once again to be the general chair of the 2013 edition of the ECCE conference; the conference was in my blood at this point. I had the good fortune of having a stellar group of volunteers serve as the organizing committee. The following year, I rotated to be the chair of the steering committee for ECCE. It was then that I formed an informal group of past organizing chairs of the ECCE to advise and inform the upcoming chairs of our lessons learned and to serve as touchstone for their decisions since the ECCE is a unique conference. This informal group had no agenda, no portfolio, our sole purpose was to serve as sounding board and give the general chair the value of our experience, because we were all committed.

A few years ago, Prof. Andy Knight asked me to take on my next role within IEEE IAS as the ScholarOne administrator, as Louie Powell was retiring from this role. In time, I learned about the publications part of the IEEE IAS. In that role I had the good fortune of interfacing with a succession of publication chairs: Andy Knight, Ayman EL-Refaie, and Leon Tolbert; as well as Editors-in Chiefs: Tom Nondahl, David Durocher, and Kashem Muttagi; but the man who had who had saved my butt innumerable times is Louie Powell, he mentored me in the black arts of ScholarOne, and I am forever grateful.

The reason I chose going through the arc of my involvement with the IEEE IAS is to simply to demonstrate a path to those who are contemplating becoming involved in the IEEE IAS. As you can see, my experience within the IEEE IAS benefited me much more than I could have hoped. I hope that I will be able to benefit the society that has shaped my professional life.

We are engineers, as such, we seek execution, we seek to fulfill our duties, and we seek to shoulder responsibilities.

We don’t seek fame; we don’t seek recognition. Even though I will always treasure this recognition today, I will also always value the experience that I have gained from working for my electrical engineering community and especially for my colleagues. This is the least I can do to repay the debt that I owed the society that has meant so much in my professional life.

We do this work because we are a part of the greater community of fellow engineers who have become colleagues and friends. We pursue this volunteerism for our shared passion for the application of the electrical engineering art to industry, we occupy a space that is defined by seeking the answers to the questions: what if we applied the theoretical to the practical, and what do those solutions look like in real, functioning applications.

How we do it matters. There is a concept in Chinese Taoist philosophy called Wu-Wei (無為), which means Trying Not to Try. My interpretation of Wu-Wei manifests itself as the following.

We do our work with our heads down.

We do it humbly.

We do it effectively.

We do it efficiently.

We do it boldly.

Thank you.