Payman Dehghanian, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, was awarded the 2016 Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP) Higher Standards Scholarship, was awarded a scholarship by the Association of Energy Engineers Foundation and received the Graduate Student Presentation Grant from the Association of Former Students.
Dehghanian was one of only five awardees nationwide selected for the SMRP Higher Standards Scholarship. The awardees will attend the SMRP Annual Conference in Jacksonville, FL. The Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals is a nonprofit professional society formed by practitioners to advance the reliability and physical asset management industry and to create leaders in the field.
After a nationwide search, the $2,000 scholarship was awarded to Dehghanian by the Association of Energy Engineers Foundation. The scholarship aims to encourage practitioners in energy engineering and energy management to further education in the field.
The Graduate Student Presentation Grant, funded by the Association of Former Students and the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies at Texas A&M, is granted to compensate expenses for attending the International Conference on Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems in Beijing, China, in October.
Dehghanian, who is advised by Dr. Mladen Kezunovic, the Eugene E. Webb Professor in the department, is the current leader of the Texas A&M student branch joint chapter of the IEEE PELS-PES-IAS. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Tehran in 2009 and his master's degree from Sharif University of Technology in 2011, both in electrical engineering. His research interests include power system protection and control, power system reliability, asset management, maintenance scheduling, renewable integration and smart-grid applications.
Other recent honors include being accepted for participation at the Prognostic and Health Management Society’s Symposium, being selected as a potential future leader by IEEE, receiving the Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid-of-Research, receiving a 2nd Place Prize for Best Poster Award at the 2016 IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Transmission and Distribution (T&D) Conference and Exposition, a research grant scholarship from the American Public Power Association under the Demonstration of Energy and Efficiency Development (DEED) Program, being awarded the Roland and Margaret Prove Southerland Aggie Leader Scholarship for the 2016-2017 academic year and being selected as the IEEE Industry Application Society Electric Safety Workshop 2017 student program chair.