Dr. Ronald G. Harley
Dr. Ronald Gordon Harley [ M'77,SM'86, F'92] received the B.Sc.Eng. degree (cum laude) in 1960 and the M.Sc.Eng. degree (cum laude) in 1965, both in Electrical Engineering, from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of London, UK, in 1969. In 1970 he was appointed Chair of Electrical Machines and Power Systems Department at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa. In 1983 he became the Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering, and in 1995 the Deputy Dean of Engineering at that university. He has been a visiting professor to Iowa State University, to Clemson University, and to Georgia Institute of Technology (in 1975, 1985 and 1994 respectively). He is currently the Duke Power Company Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Dr. Harley's research has been in the area of the control of electrical machines and power systems, power electronics and adjustable speed drives, and more lately, in the application of neural networks to identify and control these processes. He has supervised over 50 M.Sc.Eng. (each one by research thesis) and 18 Ph.D. candidates. He has co-authored two text books, including the well-known book with the late Bernard Adkins on The General Theory of Alternating Current Machines: Application to Practical Problems, Chapman and Hall (1975), now in its 6th edition, and translated into Serbo-Croat and Chinese. He has also published over 220 papers (9 of which attracted prizes), and presented them at more than 45 international conferences held in the USA, Germany, Italy, UK, Hungary, Spain, Canada, France, Finland, Belgium, and South Africa. He has organized and taught in two IEEE international tutorials, and has been a co-author of a number of invited and position papers on the application of neural networks to control power electronics and motor drives. He was a panel member of the IEEE IECON99 Special Session on Advances and Trends in Power Electronics and Drives.
He regularly reviews papers for international conferences and journals, and on three occasions he has been a reviewer for the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC. He has presented invited seminars at the University of Rome, Israel Institute of Technology (Haifa), University of Toronto, and Purdue University. Dr. Harley has been the Technical Program Co-chair for the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society ISIE98 (International Symposium on Industrial Electronics) Symposium which moves around the world and took place in South Africa for the first time in June 1998. Dr. Harley was the Technical Program Co-Chair of the 1998 IEEE FEPPCON III (Future of Electronic Power Processing and Control) held in Kruger Park, South Africa. He has organized and chaired numerous sessions in IEEE and other international conferences.
He is a member of the IEEE Power Engineering Society, Power Electronics Society, Industrial Electronics Society, Industry Application Society, and Control Society. He is also a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, UK; a Fellow of the Royal Society in South Africa; a Fellow of the University of Natal; and a Founder Member of the Academy of Science in South Africa.
Lecture topics include:
- Application and Implementation of Neural Network Control for Induction Motors and Synchronous Generators
- Application and Implementation of Continually-Online Trained Feed-forward Neural Networks for Fast Adaptive Control and Prediction in Power Electronic System
- An Overview of Inverter-Based Series Compensator FACTS Devices to Improve The Dynamic Behavior of Turbo-Generators and Power Lines
Mailing Address:
Dr. R G Harley
Duke Power Company Distinguished Professor
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0250, USA
Phone: (404) 894-1876
FAX: (404) 894-4641
E-mail: rharley@ee.gatech.edu