The UT Energy Symposium welcomes Robert Hebner, Director, Center for Electromechanics, The University of Texas at Austin, to give a talk titled "What We Measure Matters – US Electricity in the Future."
Speaker bio: Bob's current projects include improved hybrid vehicles, energy storage, Smart Grid, and microgrids. Before joining the University, Bob spent a significant portion of his career at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), beginning in a postdoctoral position and ultimately serving as acting Director. He also served in the Office of Management and Budget, at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and, for a short time, did research at Sandia National Laboratory. At NIST, an early responsibility was to modify the US system for watthour meter calibration from the traditional analog meters to supporting the emerging digital metering. This reduced the cost of maintaining accuracy by millions of dollars and removed an impediment to the adoption of the smart meters that are widely used today.
In 2013, he was the vice president of the IEEE for Technical Activities. The IEEE is a global technical society in computing and electrotechnology with more than 400,000 members. In that position, he had oversight responsibility for such activities as Smart Grid, Smart Cities, and Transportation Electrification. He has had senior management experience with responsibility for an annual budget approaching one billion dollars, but maintained a technical focus. He has a Ph.D. and coauthored more than one hundred and fifty technical papers and reports.
The UT Energy Symposium meets every Thursday during the long semesters. Come early to attend a networking session before the talk: refreshments will be served at 4:45 p.m. in the POB Connector Lobby outside the auditorium.