Hirofumi Akagi

Hirofumi Akagi was born in Okayama, Japan in 1951. He received his B.S. degree from Nagoya Institute of Technology in 1974, and his M.S. and Ph. D. degrees from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1976 and 1979, in all electrical engineering. In the same year, Dr. Akagi joined Nagaoka University of Technology as an Assistant and then Associate Professor. In 1987, he was a Visiting Scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for ten months. From 1991 to 1999, he was a Professor at Okayama University. From March to August of 1996, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and then Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since January 2000, he has been a Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. Over the past twenty years, Dr. Akagi has conducted comprehensive research on static power converters, ac motor drives, high-frequency resonant inverters for induction heating and corona discharge treatment processes, and utility applications of power electronics such as active filters for power conditioning and FACTS (Flexible AC Transmission Systems) devices. Most importantly, Dr. Akagi initiated the instantaneous power theory in three-phase circuits in 1983. His paper entitled ``Instantaneous reactive power compensators comprising switching devices without energy storage components'' was presented at the IEEE IAS Annual Meeting in 1983, and then it was published in the IEEE Transactions on IAS in 1984. The Transactions paper has been referred to very often in the international literature, and it has been followed with many papers including and/or expanding the basic concept created in the original paper.