Ayan Mallik to join Arizona State University faculty

Alumnus Ayan Mallik (ECE Ph.D. 2019) will be joining the Arizona State University ECE faculty this fall as an assistant professor. Mallik was advised by Professor Alireza Khaligh (ECE/ISR).

Mallik's research spans several areas of power engineering and energy systems for electric vehicles and “more electric” aircraft. This includes modeling, simulation, design and development of power electronics interfaces. He has both extensive knowledge in control systems and excellent hands-on experience. and has research interests in power electronics.

At Maryland, Mallik was selected for several important honors. He won the 2019 Doctoral Student Research Award for his dissertation, "Regulated Transformer Rectifier Unit for More Electric Aircrafts." The award, given by Clark School Dean Darryll Pines, recognizes distinguished graduate student researchers to help propel their careers and demonstrate the value of high-quality engineering research.

Mallik also was a Distinguished Dissertation Fellow of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for 2018–2019. The fellowships are awarded to outstanding students in the final stages of dissertation work in recognition of their research excellence.

Along with his advisor Alireza Khaligh and fellow graduate student Jiangheng Lu, Mallik was an inventor of the Integrated Power Electronics Interface for Enhanced Electric Vehicle Charging, which won the University of Maryland's 2018 Invention of the Year Award, in the Physical Sciences category, and the overall top prize. The interface condenses previous charging mechanisms into one system which is more than 50% cheaper and lighter, almost 40% smaller, and 8% more efficient than current chargers.

In 2017, Mallik won ISR's George Harhalakis Outstanding Systems Engineering Graduate Student Award, as well as the Kulkarni Foundation Summer Research Fellowship, which supports UMD doctoral students who are graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).

Published June 10, 2019