Khurram Afridi
Associate Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Biography
Khurram Afridi is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received the BS degree in EE from Caltech (1989), and SM (1992) and PhD (1998) degrees in EECS from MIT. His research interests are in power electronics and energy systems incorporating power electronic controls. Prior to joining Cornell University, he was an Assistant Professor at CU Boulder. He was a visiting faculty at MIT’s EECS Department (2009-2013) and the COO (2000-2010) and CTO (1997-2000) of Techlogix. From 2004 to 2008 he led the development of LUMS School of Science and Engineering (SSE) as Project Director. He has also worked for JPL, Lutron, Philips, and Schlumberger. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics, and was the Technical Program Committee (TPC) chair for the IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference (WPTC) 2015 and co-chair for the IEEE Workshop on Emerging Technologies: Wireless Power (WoW) 2021. He received the Carnation Merit Award from Caltech (1988), the BMW Scientific Award from BMW AG (1999), the Werner-von-Siemens Chair for Power Electronics from LUMS SSE (2008), the Dean’s Professional Progress Award from CU Boulder (2015), the ECEE Department Outstanding Overall Performance Award from CU Boulder (2016), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award from NSF (2016), and the Cornell Engineering Research Excellence Award from Cornell (2021). He is co-author of five IEEE prize papers.
Research Interests
Professor Afridi’s primary research interest is in high frequency power electronics and energy systems incorporating power electronic controls as a means to efficiently harness, store, process, transmit, distribute and use energy. While his work across this entire energy chain is centered on the design of advanced power electronic converters, his research also includes solutions at the system and component level that draw upon his broad academic and industrial experience and leverage collaborations with faculty members in allied disciplines. The vision of his high frequency power electronics research group is to develop electronic energy conversion technologies that are ultra efficient, extremely compact, more reliable, highly intelligent, less expensive, and enable the development of next-generation energy systems incorporating power electronic controls. He strives to achieve this vision through innovations in system architectures, circuit topologies and control appropriate for high frequency power electronics.
Teaching Interests
Circuits and Electronics, Power Electronics and Photovoltaic Power Systems
Selected Publications
- Jie Lu, David J. Perreault, David M. Otten, and Khurram Afridi. “Impedance Control Network Resonant DC-DC Converter for Wide-Range High-Efficiency Operation.” IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, Vol. 31, No.7, July 2016.
- Yu Ni, Saad Pervaiz, Minjie Chen, and Khurram Afridi. “Energy Density Enhancement of Stacked Switched Capacitor Energy Buffers Through Capacitance Ratio Optimization.” IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, Vol. 32, No. 8, August 2017
- Ashish Kumar, Sreyam Sinha, Alihossein Sepahvand, and Khurram Afridi. “Improved Design Optimization for High-Efficiency Matching Networks.” IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, Vol. 33, No. 1, January 2018.
Selected Awards and Honors
- First Place Prize Paper Award, IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 2017
- Best Paper Award, IEEE COMPEL, 2017
- Goh Faculty Fellowship, CU Boulder, 2017
- NSF CAREER Award, National Science Foundation, 2016
Education
- BS (Electrical Engineering), California Institute of Technology, 1989
- MS (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992
- PhD (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998