Professor Ron Hui received his Ph.D degree at Imperial College London in 1988. Previously he held academic positions at the University of Nottingham, University of Sydney, and University of Hong Kong. Presently, he is the MediaTek Endowed Professor at Nanyang Technological University and Chair Professor of Power Electronics at Imperial College London. His research covers power electronics, wireless power, smart grid and lighting technology. He has over 120 patents adopted by industry and published over 320 refereed journal papers with five IEEE Transactions Prize Paper Awards. His inventions underpin the key dimensions of the world’s first wireless charging standard “Qi” launched in 2010 by the Wireless Power Consortium. He is the recipient of the 2010 IET Crompton Medal, 2010 IEEE Rudolf Chope R&D Award and 2015 IEEE Technical Field Award (IEEE William Newell Power Electronics Award). He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, U.K., Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, the US National Academy of Inventors and the IEEE. He chaired the Selection Committee of the IEEE Medal in Power Engineering in 2020-2022.

Plenary talk summary: The first generation of wireless power transfer (WPT) standard Qi, launched in 2010, contains a wide range of transmitter and receiver designs with the aim of maximizing compatibility to attract many manufacturers to share the same standard.  Such compatibility feature (i.e., interoperability) has not only attracted over 400 company members in the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), but also facilitated a fast-growing wireless power market for a decade. The WPC is now expanding the scope of WPT applications to mid-power and high-power applications up to several kilowatts. Airfuel Alliance also proposes its standard at 6.78MHz while the Society for Automobile Engineers (SAE) sets the SAE standard for wireless charging of electric vehicles (EVs) up to tens of kilowatts at 85kHz. Without compromising compatibility, the speaker will share his views on the need for a paradigm shift from compatibility to optimal performance in terms of maximum energy efficiency for the entire charging process and minimum charging time. This paradigm change is imminent and important in view of the increasing power of WPT applications. It is applicable to different WPT standards for a wide range of applications. Several enabling technologies essential to the paradigm shift will be addressed and presented with practical results. Emerging technologies for WPT in the high-frequency (>10MHz) and high-power (kilowatts) WPT regime based on high-speed gate drive and soft-switched full-bridge inverters will be described.

Amy Barzdukas is the Chief Marketing Officer at WiTricity, responsible for leading global marketing for WiTricity and driving the company through its next wave of growth as EVs with WiTricity’s patented wireless charging solutions become commercially available. Barzdukas has more than 25 years of B2B and consumer marketing, communications, and product management experience. Prior to WiTricity, Barzdukas was CMO of Omnitracs, the global pioneer of fleet management solutions to transportation and logistics companies. Before Omnitracs, Barzdukas was CMO and Executive Vice President at Poly, Inc. and Polycom, Inc., Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Business Personal Systems at Hewlett Packard, Inc., and held various positions at Microsoft. Barzdukas attended Wellesley College and earned her BA from Abilene Christian University.

Nuno Borges Carvalho was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1972. He received his Diploma and Doctoral degrees in electronics and telecommunications engineering from the University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal, in 1995 and 2000, respectively.

He is currently a Full Professor and a Senior Research Scientist with the Institute of Telecommunications, University of Aveiro, the director of the Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics at UA, and an IEEE Fellow. He coauthored Intermodulation in Microwave and Wireless Circuits (Artech House, 2003), Microwave and Wireless Measurement Techniques (Cambridge University Press, 2013), White Space Communication Technologies (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Wireless Power Transmission for Sustainable Electronics (Wiley, 2020). He has been a reviewer and author of over 400 papers in magazines and conferences. He is the Editor in Chief of the Cambridge Wireless Power Transfer Journal, an associate editor of the IEEE Microwave Magazine, and former associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques and IET Microwaves Antennas and Propagation Journal.

He is the co-inventor of six patents. His main research interests include software-defined radio front-ends, backscatter communications, wireless power transmission, nonlinear distortion analysis, and measurements in microwave/wireless circuits and systems. He has been involved in the design of dedicated radios and systems for newly emerging wireless technologies.

Dr. Borges Carvalho is a member of the IEEE MTT ADCOM, the past chair of the IEEE Portuguese Section, TC-20 and TC-11, and also belongs to the technical committees, TC-25 and TC-26. He is also the Chair of the URSI Commission A (Metrology Group). He was the recipient of the 1995 University of Aveiro and the Portuguese Engineering Association Prize for the best 1995 student at the University of Aveiro, the 1998 Student Paper Competition (Third Place) of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (IEEE MTT-S) International Microwave Symposium (IMS), and the 2000 IEE Measurement Prize.

He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the RFID Council and was a previous Distinguished Microwave Lecturer for the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society. In 2023 he is the IEEE-MTT President.

Grant A. Covic (S’88-M’89-SM’04), is a full professor with the Electrical, Computer, and Software Engineering Department at The University of Auckland (UoA). He began working on inductive power transfer in the mid 90’s, and by early 2000’s was jointly leading a team focused on AGV and EV charging solutions. He has published more than 200 international refereed papers in this field, worked with over 30 PhDs and filed over 40 patent families, all of which are licensed to various global companies in specialised application fields. Together with Prof. John Boys he co-foundered HaloIPT and was awarded the NZ Prime Minister’s Science Prize, amongst others for successful scientific and commercialization of this research. He is a fellow of both Engineering New Zealand, and the Royal Society of New Zealand. Presently he heads inductive power research at the UoA, is directing a government funded research program on stationary and dynamic wireless charging of EVs within the road, while also co-leading the interoperability sub-team within the SAE J2954 wireless charging standard for EV

Greg Kushnir is the founder and CEO of Emrod. A serial tech entrepreneur with a 20 years trajectory in deep tech, Greg Co-founded 8 companies and participated as an investor and board member with a number of technology firms. While energy generation & storage have progressed tremendously over the last century, energy transmission has remained virtually unchanged since Edison, Siemens, and Westinghouse first introduced electric networks based on copper wires 150 years ago. This led Greg to start looking for ways to transmit energy wirelessly over vast distances and eventually the birth of Emrod. In January 2019 Greg teamed up with world-class scientists to bring a commercially viable long-range wireless system to the world. By October 2019 a Proof of Concept was delivered to Emrods first commercial partner, PowerCo, the second largest electricity distributor in New Zealand. In October 2022 Emrod demonstrated power beaming for the European Space Agency as a technology partner for Solaris, ESA’s Space Based Solar Power project. Emrod is working with multiple energy distribution companies, telco’s, Aerospace industry, and regulators and is a recognised market leader in the commercialisation of long power beaming.

Siqi Li is professor of power electronics in the department of electrical engineering at Kunming University of Science and Technology (KUST) in Kunming, China. He received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2004 and 2010, respectively. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the University of Michigan, Dearborn, MI, USA, from 2011 to 2013. In the past two decades, he has been mainly engaged in the research of power electronic converters, wired and wireless charging systems, and has completed prototypes with power ranging from 5 watts to 300 kilowatts. He has over 30 Journal papers published, 20 patents granted and is included in the Elsevier’s list of highly cited scholars in China. Under his guidance, his students have won multiple awards in the field of power electronics and wireless power transfer, including the winner of the IEEE International Future Energy Challenge in 2017 and the first place in the Midea Group’s national WPT competition in China in 2022. In 2022, he also founded a startup company, Suzhou Kafang Energy Technology, which has launched several wireless charging products operating at MHz frequencies.

Contact Information: lisiqi@kust.edu.cn, +86-18687176365

Valentina Palazzi received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in industrial and information engineering from the University of Perugia, Italy, in 2014 and 2018, respectively.

In 2015 she was a Visiting Ph.D. Student with the Tyndall National Institute, Cork, Ireland; in 2016 she did a short-term scientific mission with the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, sponsored by the cost action IC1301 “WiPE”; from December 2016 to April 2017 she was a student intern with the Agile Technologies for High- Performance Electromagnetic Novel Applications Research Group, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. Since 2019, she has been a researcher with the High Frequency Electronics Laboratory, Department of Engineering, University of Perugia, Italy. She has co-authored more than 60 articles, and holds 3 patents. Her current research interests include the design of RF components, wireless sensors, radar front ends, wireless power transfer technologies, additive manufacturing processes, and conformal electronics.

Dr. Palazzi is the 2023 Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S) AdCom Secretary. She is chair of the IEEE MTT-S Technical Committee- 26 “RFID, Wireless Sensor and IoT, and she is the Early Career Representative of the Commission D “Electronics and Photonics” of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI). She was a recipient of the First Place Award of the Student Design Competition on Wireless Energy Harvesting at the 2016 IEEE MTT-S “International Microwave Symposium” (IMS), of the 2017 IEEE MTT-S Graduate Fellowship, of the 2017 MTT-S Prize – Italy Chapter Central and Southern Italy, of the URSI Young Scientist Best Paper Award at the 2019 URSI Italian National Meeting, of the Second Place at the 3 Minute Thesis Competition at IMS 2021, and of the GAAS Young Scientist Recognition (URSI Commission D) at GASS 2021.

Duleepa J. Thrimawithana (M’06-SM’18), received his BE in Electrical Engineering (with First Class Honors) in 2005 and his Ph.D. in power electronics in 2009 from The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. From 2005 to 2008, he worked in collaboration with Tru-Test Ltd. in Auckland as a Research Engineer in the areas of power converters and high-voltage pulse generator design. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Auckland in 2009 where he currently works as a Senior Lecturer. He has co-authored over 100 international journal and conference publications and holds 24 patent families on wireless power transfer technologies. In recognition of his outstanding contributions to engineering as an early carrier researcher, Dr. Thrimawithana received the Jim and Hazel D. Lord Fellowship in 2014. His main research areas include wireless power transfer, power electronics and renewable energy.

Hubregt J. Visser was born in Goes, The Netherlands, on October 26, 1964. He received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 1989. In 1990, after fulfilling his military service at TNO Physics and Electronics Laboratory, The Hague, The Netherlands, he joined the same laboratory as a civilian. He has participated in several projects concerning near-field antenna measurements, monolithic microwave integrated circuits design, and phased-array antenna design. From mid-1996 to mid-1997, he was stationed at the European Space Research and Technology Centre, RF Systems Division, Noordwijk, The Netherlands, where he worked on array antenna modeling. In 2001 he joined TNO Science and Industry, Eindhoven, The Netherlands where he has been involved in antenna miniaturization projects. Since 2006 he has been part-time connected to the Holst Centre, Eindhoven, The Netherlands and since 2009 he joined the Holst Centre as an employee of imec. Here he is working on wireless energy transfer for biomedical implants. In 2009 he obtained a Ph.D. from Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He is part-time full professor at Eindhoven University of Technology where he teaches antenna theory. Hubregt is the author of the books ‘Array and Phased Array Antenna Basics’ (Wiley, 2005), ‘Approximate Antenna Analysis for CAD’ (Wiley, 2009) and `Antenna Theory and Applications’ (Wiley, 2012). Hubregt was co-organizer and co-chair of the 2019 IEEE Wireless Power Week in London, UK.

Qiaowei Yuan is a distinguished full professor at the Tohoku Institute of Technology, as well as a specially appointed professor at Tohoku University in Japan. She obtained her PhD degree from Xidian University in China, where she spent two years conducting research at Tohoku University in Japan. Dr. Yuan has extensive experience in antenna engineering, adaptive array antennas, and wireless power transfer (WPT) technology, having worked at Japanese companies and universities. She has co-authored three books on these topics and her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Best Paper Award and the Zenichi Kiyasu Award from the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) of Japan, as well as several Achievement Awards from IEICE’s Technical Committee on Wireless Power Transfer and Antenna Propagation Committee.

Dr. Yuan has also held various leadership positions, including serving as the secretary of IEICE’s Technical Committee on Wireless Power Transfer, as well as being the vice-chair and chair of IEEE Sendai Women in Engineering (WIE). She was a member of IEEE’s R10 WIE committee from 2021 to 2022, and currently serves as a member of IEEE MTT TC-25 and the vice-chair of the Technical Committee on Antennas and Propagation of IEICE.