ECE Ph.D. Candidate Menon Wins Kulkarni Fellowship

Anup Menon, an Electrical and Computer Engineering Ph.D. student, was awarded the 2014 Kulkarni Foundation Summer Research Fellowship, which supports UMD doctoral students who are graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).

“Receiving the Kulkarni fellowship is a great morale boost, and I'm very grateful for this recognition of my work,” Menon said.

Menon received his Masters in Systems and Control Engineering from IIT, Bombay in 2008 and will graduate from UMD in 2014. He is currently a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate under Professor John Baras (ECE/ISR).

Menon’s research is motivated by the problem of maximizing power production of wind farms. Since there are aerodynamic interactions between wind turbines, each maximizing its individual power production does not lead to farm-level optimal power capture. Further, there are no accurate models for the said aerodynamic interactions. In his research, he has been developing provably correct model-free distributed algorithms that help solve such problems. These algorithms help maximize total power production by having the turbines iterate over their individual set-points on-line.

“The Kulkarni fellowship will help me test these algorithms on higher-fidelity models of wind farms, including building such simulation models,” Menon said.

Ashok V. Kulkarni (Ph.D., CS ’76) and the Kulkarni Foundation established the fellowship in January 2013, and award it to students to help them complete their degree. This is the second year that the awardee has been a student in ECE. We congratulate Menon on his award.

Published May 27, 2014