Sambalpur: Subham Sahoo, a researcher hailing from Bamra in Odisha’s Sambalpur district, has been selected to receive the Richard M Bass Outstanding Young Power Electronics Engineer Award 2026.
He is the first Indian engineer to earn this international honour, recognising his pioneering work that integrates artificial intelligence, communication systems, and power electronics, with a strong emphasis on secure and reliable design of power electronic systems, including advancements in microgrid protection, cybersecurity, and physics-informed neural networks for converter control.
The award, established in 1999 by the IEEE Power Electronics Society to commemorate Richard M Bass of the Georgia Institute of Technology, recognises outstanding contributions in power electronics by researchers under the age of 35. It is considered one of the highest accolades for young professionals in the field.
Sahoo, who currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Energy at Aalborg University (AAU) in Denmark, was previously associated with leading institutions, including the University of Edinburgh, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and MIT. He is also affiliated with organisations such as the Danish Data Science Academy, European laboratories and the Lundbeck Foundation.
He completed his schooling at Kendriya Vidyalaya in Sambalpur and earned his BTech in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology (VSSUT), Burla. He went on to obtain his PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, followed by postdoctoral research stints at NUS and Aalborg University. He is a recipient of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) Innovative Students Project Award for the best PhD thesis across all the institutes in India for the year 2019. He was also a distinguished reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid in the year 2020.
Sahoo will receive the award at a ceremony in Vancouver, Canada, during the first week of October 2026.