Dr. Emanuel E. Landsman
2002 William E. Newell Power Electronics Award Recipient
Emanuel E. Landsman was born in Brooklyn, New York in January 1937. He graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1954; studied Electrical Engineering at The City College of New York (CCNY); transferred to M.I.T. where he received a BSEE, 1958, MSEE, 1959, Doctor of Science, 1966. In 1961, he was appointed to the M.I.T. staff position of Instructor to teach Electrical Engineering courses and to work on his Doctoral Thesis. After graduation he joined the Technical Staff at M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory to work on the design and construction of DC/DC power converters, servo amplifiers, and DC/AC inverters to be used in three synchronous orbit Air Force communications satellites. He was responsible for the design, construction and testing of all the power converters and inverters used in these spacecraft programs, supervised the Nickel-Cadmium battery selection and evaluation program, participated in Solar Panel design, and designed and built a 1500 watt "Rotary Transformer" (Slip-ring replacement). Following the successful completion and on-orbit operation of these satellites for more than twice their design life, he helped to form the Energy Systems Engineering group at Lincoln Laboratory. The primary mission of this group was to design and install demonstration photovoltaic power systems. He acted as consultant to the US Department of Energy to monitor programs to develop advanced power conversion for photovoltaic power systems.
While at Lincoln Lab, he helped organize and contributed technical papers to the Power Electronics Specialists Conference since it's organization in 1968. The first formal Power Conditioning Specialists Conference was held at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt MD in 1970 under the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Group. Dr. Landsman contributed papers and wrote one of the early papers on the transient and stability analysis of pulse-width-modulated converters as well as renowned paper "A Unifying Derivation of Switching DC-DC Converter Topologies", at the 1979 Power Electronics Specialists Conference held in San Diego CA, where a lively discussion was held about the Cuk topology
In early 1981, he and two other engineers left Lincoln Laboratory to form American Power Conversion Corp. APC designed and built utility-interactive inverters for use with photovoltaic power systems.
In 1985 APC developed its first uninterruptible power supply for use with desktop computers, went public in 1988, and has grown to $1.5 billion in sales with 5000 employees. Dr. Landsman was involved in product design, product safety and emissions testing, and the writing and review of US and international product safety standards. He has mentored many young APC engineers, some of whom have gone on to start their own companies. Recently he headed the APC involvement in the DOE Energy Challenge where 14 universities competed for prizes to design low cost inverters for fuel cell sources.