PowerAmerica Executive Director and CTO Victor Veliadis was presented with a 2026 APEX Award of Excellence in the category of “Writing/Topics > Technical and Technology Writing” at IEEE’s annual Energy Conversion Congress & Expo, which was held from Oct. 4-8 in Vancouver, Canada.
The award, presented by the IEEE Power Electronics Society, was given to Veliadis and Thomas Jahns, an emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for a paper they co-authored — “Monolithic Bidirectional Lateral GaN Switches Reinvigorate Power Electronics Applications” — which was published in IEEE Power Electronics Magazine in March 2025.
As Executive Director and CTO of PowerAmerica, Veliadis has managed a budget of $156 million — strategically allocated to over 210 industrial and university projects to catalyze SiC and GaN semiconductor and power electronics manufacturing, workforce development, and job creation. His PowerAmerica educational activities have trained 430 full-time university students in collaborative industry-university wide bandgap (WBG) projects, and engaged over 7500 attendees in tutorials, short courses, and webinars. Veliadis is also a professor at NC State University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, an IEEE Fellow, a National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow, and an IEEE EDS Distinguished Lecturer.