Robert W. Erickson received the B.S. (1978), M.S. (1980), and Ph.D. (1982) degrees in Electrical Engineering, from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California.
Since 1982, he has been a member of the faculty of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he served as department Chair in 2002-2006 and 2014-15. He co-directs the Colorado Power Electronics Center with Prof. Dragan Maksimovic. Professor Erickson is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the CU/NREL Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, and is the author of the textbook Fundamentals of Power Electronics, now in its second edition. He is the author of approximately one hundred journal and conference papers in the area of power electronics. In 1996, he received the IEEE Power Electronics Society Transactions Prize Paper Award, for the paper "Nonlinear Carrier Control for High-Power-Factor Boost Rectifier." He received the CU-Boulder Inventor of the Year Award in 2015, and the Holland Teaching Excellence Award in 2010. His current research interests include modeling and control of power conversion systems, modular/multilevel converter systems, and power electronics for electric vehicles and renewable energy sources (wind and solar).
Dr. Maksimovic is a Charles V. Schelke Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. He co-founded the Colorado Power Electronics Center (CoPEC), and has since served as the CoPEC Co-Director. CoPEC research program in smart power electronics and digital control for high-frequency switched-mode power converters has attracted significant support from numerous industrial sponsors and agencies (NSF, DARPA, ARPA-E, DOE, ONR, DOEd). Prof. Maksimovic is a Fellow of the IEEE. He has published over 300 papers in journals and at professional conferences, and holds over 30 US patents.
His current research interests include power electronics for renewable energy sources and energy efficiency, high frequency power conversion using wide bandgap semiconductors, digital control of switched-mode power converters, as well as analog, digital and mixed-signal integrated circuits for power management applications.