IEEE Toronto Section Elections

IEEE Toronto Section Chair

Olivier Trescases, PhD, PEng, IEEE SM
Associate Professor, University of Toronto

Dr. Olivier Trescases received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at the University of Toronto in 2007. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in January 2009, and was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2014. He conducts research on power electronics for automotive, industrial, aerospace and renewable energy applications. Dr. Trescases has worked for some of the top global semiconductor companies, including Infineon, NXP Semiconductor and Texas Instruments. He is the founder of Tecium Designs, a company specializing in power electronics and power ICs in Toronto. He is the co-inventor for 12 patents. Dr. Trescases has published over 70 papers in IEEE conferences and journals. He received three best-paper awards, one IEEE Vehicular Technology award as well as the 2010 Green Innovation Award from the City of Toronto. He is currently the Vice Chair of the IEEE Toronto Section and has served on the technical committee of various IEEE conferences, including the Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC), the International Symposium on Power Semiconductor Devices & ICS (ISPSD), the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) and the Vehicle Power and Propulsion Conference (VPPC). He is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.

IEEE Toronto Section Vice-Chair

Ali Nabavi, PhD, PEng, IEEE SM
Senior Research Associate, University of Toronto

Dr. Nabavi is a Senior Member of IEEE and a professional engineer in the Province of Ontario. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1987 and 1990, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto in 1996. Upon graduation he joined the University of Mazandaran, Iran as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Since then he has been actively engaged in research and development in the general area of power systems, power electronics and teaching and supervising of graduate students. He was elevated to the rank of associate professor in 2003. Since 2004, he has been with the Centre for Applied Power Electronics (CAPE), University of Toronto, as a Senior Research Associate and has been actively collaborating on research projects with various utilities and advanced industries. During his academic career, he have supervised more than 29 graduate students, published more than 25 journal papers, 45 technical papers, numerous proprietary industry presentations and technical reports and six patent disclosures in the areas of energy systems, power electronics and power systems.

IEEE Toronto Section Secretary

Maryam Davoudpour, PhD, IEEE SM
Professor, Humber College

Dr. Davoudpour received the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Moscow State Technical University of Bauman in Information Technology and Control Complex Systems, and she also holds a B.Sc in Electrical Engineering. She joined Ryerson University in 2008 and recently Humber College. She works in both industry and academia, and was involved in various successful R&D projects. She was a NSERC fellow for her post-doctoral work. She is a member of the DMZ (Digital Media Zone) at Ryerson University.

Dr. Davoudpour’s research interests are in the areas of Nonlinear Modeling, Knowledge-Based Expert Systems, Petri Nets, Modeling Context Aware Systems and Internet of Things.
She is an active reviewer of various IEEE publications and conferences. Dr. Davoudpour is the chair of the IEEE Instrumentation, Measurement, Robotics and Automation chapter in Toronto and she is the Chair of Women in Engineering (WIE) at IEEE Toronto, as well as the WIE representative for Central Canada.

IEEE Toronto Section Treasurer

Marjan Alavi, PhD, PEng
Professor, Sheridan College

Dr. Alavi received her Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering (Control and Instrumentations) from K.N. Toosi University of Technology in 2004 and her Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering (Micro- and Nano-Electronic Devices) from Sharif University of Technology in 2007. She received the Singapore International Graduate Award in January 2010 and has a Ph.D. from the School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering of Nanyang Technological University (NTU). She was a research associate at NTU working with Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology and Rolls-Royce on developing model-based fault diagnosis, fault tolerant control, and prognosis methods for hybrid systems. She was a member of the Electronics Department at Bloorintar Co. where she designed and manufactured programmable power supplies and electronic lab instruments. She was also a member of the Academic Board at Azad University where she taught several courses including Analog and Digital Electronics and was a researcher at the University of Toronto. She has 14 refereed publications and serves as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.