Leon M. Tolbert received his Bachelor's of Electrical Engineering
with highest honors in 1989 and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering
in 1991 from the Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta.
He joined the Engineering Division of
Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1991 and worked on several electrical distribution
and power quality projects
at the three U.S. Department of Energy plants in
Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In 1997, he became a Research Engineer in the
Power Electronics and Electric Machinery
Research Center (PEEMRC) in the Energy and Transportation Sciences Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Some of his projects included thermal and efficiency modeling for
hybrid electric vehicles, development of multilevel inverter PWM methods,
and testing methods to approximate electric machine efficiency.
In 1999, he received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the
Georgia Institute of Technology. He was appointed as an assistant professor
in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
at The University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1999 and promoted
to associate professor in 2005. He has been an associate department head in the
Min Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since 2007.
In 2008, he was named the Min H. Kao Professor in the department.
He does research in the areas of electric power conversion, SiC power devices,
multilevel converters, hybrid electric vehicles, and reactive power compensation and active filters.
He is also a participating faculty member of the Graduate Automotive Technology
Education (GATE) Center at UT.
Dr. Tolbert is also a part time research engineer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and conducts
joint research at the National Transportation
Research Center (NTRC).
He is a Registered
Professional Engineer in the state of Tennessee, a Senior Member of
the IEEE, and a member of the
IEEE Industry Applications Society,
IEEE Power Electronics Society, and
IEEE Power and Energy Society.
He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.
He was the chairman of the Education Activities Committee of the IEEE Power Electronics Society from 2003-2007.
He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation
CAREER Award and the 2001 IEEE Industry Applications Society Outstanding Young
Member Award. He has had three prize papers: second prize in 1992 and
first prize in 2006 from the IEEE Industry Applications Society Annual
Meeting, and a prize paper in 2009 from the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.
He has received the following awards at The University of Tennessee:
Engineering Research Fellow Award in 2003 and 2007, Chancellor's
Citation for Professional Promise in Research and Creative Achievement
in 2003, Gonzalez Family Faculty Exellence Award in Research in 2004, and
the Weston Fulton Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching in
2001. |
