Farhad Rachidi (IEEE Fellow, EMP Fellow, Electromagnetics Academy Fellow) was born in Geneva in 1962. He received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, in 1986 and 1991 respectively.
He worked at the Power Systems Laboratory of the same institute until 1996 and had several short stays at the University of Florida and the NASA Kennedy Space Center. In 1997, he joined the Lightning Research Laboratory of the University of Toronto in Canada and from April 1998 until September 1999, he was with Montena EMC in Switzerland. He is currently a titular professor and the head of the EMC Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland.
His research interests concern electromagnetic compatibility, lightning electromagnetics and electromagnetic field interactions with transmission lines.
Dr. Rachidi is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTROMAGNETIC COMPATIBILITY and the President of the Swiss National Committee of the International Union of Radio Science.
He has received numerous awards including the 2005 IEEE EMC Technical Achievement Award, the 2005 CIGRE Technical Committee Award, the 2006 Blondel Medal from the French Association of Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Information Technology and Communication (SEE), the 2016 Berger Award from the International Conference on Lightning Protection, the 2016 Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on EMC, and the 2017 Motohisa Kanda Award for the most cited paper of the IEEE Transactions on EMC (2012-2016).
In 2014, he was conferred the title of Honorary Professor of the Xi’an Jiaotong University in China.
He served as the Vice-Chair of the European COST Action on the Physics of Lightning Flash and its Effects from 2005 to 2009, the Chairman of the 2008 European Electromagnetics International Symposium, the President of the International Conference on Lightning Protection from 2008 to 2014, the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Atmospheric Science Journal (2010-2012) and the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTROMAGNETIC COMPATIBILITY from 2013 to 2015. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the SUMMA Foundation, and a member of the Swiss Academy of Sciences.
He is the author or coauthor of over 200 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals and over 400 papers presented at international conferences.
Rachid Cherkaoui received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, in 1983 and 1992 respectively.
From 1983 to 1987, he worked at Entreprises Electriques Fribourgeoises (Swiss electrical utility) developing a state estimator and security analysis tools for the HV transmission system of that company.
From 1987 to 1992, he joined the power system laboratory of EPFL where he achieved his Ph.D. thesis in the field of optimal operation topologies for distribution systems. In this respect, he was the recipient of the ABB Swiss Award83. Since 1993, he is leading the research activities in the field of optimization and simulation techniques applied to electrical power and distribution systems.
Presently his main research topics are electricity market deregulation, distributed generation and storage, and, power system vulnerability mitigation. He is senior member of IEEE, member of technical program committees of various conferences, member of CIGRE task forces C5-2, and IEEE Swiss Chapter officer since 2005. He serves regularly as reviewer for different journals and conferences. Dr. Cherkaoui is the author or co-author of more than 50 scientific publications.
