Dr. José Rodríguez Receives the 2026 IEEE William E. Newell Power Electronics Award

Awarded by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the recognition highlights decades of research driving the energy transition and his leadership in training generations of engineers.

Controlling electrical energy has long been a central concern in engineering, but in the face of the global challenge to move away from fossil fuels, the task has become more urgent and complex. Delivering electricity generated from the sun, wind, or sea to our cities with efficiency and stability requires profound innovations in its conversion and management. This is the field in which Dr. José Rodríguez has worked for more than four decades.

Director of the Energy Transition Center at Universidad San Sebastián (USS) and an internationally recognized figure in the field of power electronics, Dr. Rodríguez has been awarded the 2026 IEEE William E. Newell Power Electronics Award, granted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest professional association for electrical and electronics engineering. This is the first time a Chilean academic received this award, which will be formally presented next year in Canada, placing him among the world’s leading researchers and educators in the field.

“Receiving the IEEE William E. Newell Power Electronics Award is a recognition of decades of research aimed at improving the control and conversion of electrical energy through power electronics, a discipline that is key to enabling the energy transition. This award, granted by the world’s largest professional society, reinforces the importance of continuing to generate knowledge and technological solutions from academia to address global energy challenges,” said Dr. Rodríguez.

The Future of Energy

Power electronics is a strategic discipline: it enables the precise conversion of electricity from one form to another, adapting it to different uses and conditions. It makes possible, for example, the connection of solar panels to the power grid, the charging of electric vehicles, the efficient control of industrial motors, and the integration of renewable sources into increasingly complex electrical systems. Without these conversion, control, and management devices and algorithms, the energy transition would not be feasible.

From this perspective, Dr. Rodríguez’s career has been among the most influential in advancing this field as a technological foundation for the energy transition. Trained as an engineer at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María and holding a PhD from Germany, he has made decisive contributions to both converter design and predictive control development. His 2007 proposal to anticipate the behavior of power systems and optimize their real-time response transformed the discipline and paved the way for new solutions in smart energy grids.

He has also been a driving force in the development of multilevel converters, which allow voltage modulation with greater efficiency and reliability. His papers on the subject are among the most cited in the history of journals such as IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, and he has been consistently recognized among the world’s most influential researchers by Clarivate Analytics.

Beyond academia, together with his team he has driven technological developments for sectors such as mining and electromobility—bridging research and application in the type of forward-looking, action-oriented engineering the world needs today. Within this framework, the IEEE William E. Newell Power Electronics Award—one of the highest honors in the field—recognizes a scientific career of far-reaching impact while underscoring the ability to produce cutting-edge knowledge from national institutions.