Dr. Brandon Grainger is currently an Eaton faculty fellow, associate professor and Director of the Electric Power Technologies Laboratory in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, Swanson School of Engineering. He is also the associate director of the Energy GRID Institute and Co-Director of Pitt AMPED. Dr. Grainger is one of the co-architects of the electric power program at Pitt that started in the fall of 2008.
Dr. Grainger’s research interests are in electric power conversion, medium to high voltage power electronics (HVDC and STATCOM), general power electronic converter design (topology, controller design, magnetics), resonant converters and high power density design, power semiconductor evaluation (SiC and GaN), aerospace power conversion systems, electric vehicle motor drives, solid state transformer design, and optimized magnetic components. Grainger has over 110 publications, 1 patent with several pending, and one co-edited research textbook. He is a senior member of the IEEE.
In aerospace related activity, Dr. Grainger and graduate students have been funded by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to investigate resonant converter designs, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to investigate GaN-based point-of-load converters and radiation impacts on controllers, Honeywell Aerospace to investigate GaN verses Silicon tradeoffs in forward converters, and interest by the Naval Research Laboratory with synchronous, high-power density designs. All activity has been initiated through Pitt's NSF SHREC center.
