IAS Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Professor Public Lecture 7 January 2026  - partner event of GYSS

“Enabling Green and Renewable Energy Solutions with Power Semiconductor Technology" by Prof Jayant Baliga (2024 Millennium Technology Prize)

The role of power semiconductor device technology on enabling the green energy revolution is described in this lecture. The invention and commercialisation of the Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) in the early 1980s allowed a transition from analog power control to digital power control. This has produced huge improvements in the efficiency for the management of electrical power that leads to reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Three examples are the electronic ignition system for gasoline powered cars, adjustable speed motor drives for air-conditioning and refrigeration, and the compact fluorescent lamp for lighting. Carbon dioxide emissions have been reduced by 216 Trillion pounds while saving world-wide consumers $ 42.5 Trillion during the 1990-2024 timeframe.

The IGBT technology is an essential component for the deployment of all-electric and hybrid electric cars, and in renewable energy generation, such as solar and wind power. This is projected to reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions by 34 Trillion pounds.

 

About the speaker [More info]: 

Prof Jayant Baliga is a preeminent expert on power semiconductor devices. He received his M.S and Ph.D degrees in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York in 1971 and 1974, respectively. In the early 1980s, he invented and commercialised the IGBT, the most widely used transistor for consumer, industrial, transportation, medical and renewable energy applications. He also proposed the development of power devices using wide band gap semiconductors in 1979 and developed the technology for them in the 1990s, eventually leading to their commercialisation.

Prof Baliga spent 15 years at the General Electric R&D Center, Schenectady, New York, overseeing their power device effort and was bestowed the highest rank of Coolidge Fellow. He joined North Carolina State University (NCSU) in 1988 as a Full Professor and was promoted to Distinguished University Professor in 1997, and subsequently to Progress Energy Distinguished University Professor. He founded four start-up companies that created successful products while at NCSU. He retired from NCSU in August 2024 and now serves as Progress Energy Distinguished University Emeritus Professor.

Prof Baliga has authored 28 books and over 750 publications in international journals and conference digests. He was honoured with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2011 by President Barack Obama at the White House; the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2014 (its highest recognition); the Global Energy Prize in 2015; and the Millennium Technology Prize in 2024 by the President of Finland. He holds 124 US patents and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame as the sole inventor of the IGBT in 2016.

 

“Can We Build an AI Climate Scientist" by Prof Torsten Hoefler (2024 ACM Prize in Computing)

We will start the discussion with a landmark achievement: the first global simulation of the full Earth system at a 1.25 km grid spacing. Our talk will focus on how we used the Alps supercomputer to model the intricate flow of energy, water, and carbon across the atmosphere, ocean, and land. We will detail the heterogeneous setup and optimisation techniques that enabled us to achieve an exceptional time compression of 82.5 simulated days per day, allowing for extensive studies of the Earth system. We will present our methodology for reducing code complexity by half while increasing both performance and portability. Finally, we will put this all into context of emerging AI methods and systems and provide an outlook into how to combine physics-based simulation and data-driven AI methods.

About the speaker [More info]: 

Prof Torsten Hoefler is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and ELLIS. He received the 2024 ACM Prize in Computing, one of the highest honours in the field. His research interests revolve around the central topic of “Performance-centric System Design” and include scalable networks, parallel programming techniques, and performance modeling. 

Prof Torsten won best paper awards at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference SC10, SC13, SC14, SC19, SC22, SC23, SC24, HPDC'15, HPDC'16, IPDPS'15, and other conferences. He has published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific conference and journal articles, and authored chapters of the MPI-2.2 and MPI-3.0 standards. 

He is also the recipient of the IEEE CS Sidney Fernbach Award, the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, the ISC Jack Dongarra award, the Latsis prize of ETH Zurich, as well as the German Max Planck-Humboldt Medal.