Lina He receives award for paper on transformer differential protection framework
Lina He receives award for paper on transformer differential protection framework
Associate Professor Lina He received a Best Paper Award at the 2026 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting in July. He, along with her PhD student Ghansham Meghwar, developed an AI-enabled differential protection scheme for transformer in power systems with inverter-based resources. The $4.1 million project is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.
Their paper, “Attention-GRU-Based Differential Protection for IBR-Interfaced Transformers,” was recognized among the top 5% of conference submissions for its technical excellence and impact.
Transformers are becoming increasingly critical to power-infrastructure expansion. These electrical devices transfer energy between circuits by changing voltage levels, either stepping up or stepping down voltage to make electricity usable for different applications. Utilities, renewable-energy projects, and rapidly growing AI data centers drive substantial demand for new grid capacity. With transformer availability emerging as a major constraint on infrastructure development, protecting existing and newly deployed transformers more intelligently and reliably is increasingly important for grid resilience and secure operation.
They presented an advanced AI-enabled transformer differential protection scheme for transformers in power systems with inverter-based resources. By integrating a gated recurrent unit (GRU) network with a temporal attention mechanism, the proposed methodology is designed to accurately distinguish internal faults, external faults, and magnetizing inrush conditions under increasingly complex grid operating conditions.
Their method achieved an overall accuracy of 99.18%, and their work contributes to the development of more intelligent, reliable, and adaptive transformer protection solutions for next-generation power grids and rapidly growing data-center infrastructure.
At the meeting, He presented two papers, participated in an invited panel where she shared work on coordinated systematic grid-forming control for weak grids, and chaired and organized another panel that explored the growing role of AI data centers in future power systems from the perspectives of utilities, system operators, research institutions, and technology providers.
“It was a pleasure to participate in the 2026 IEEE PES General Meeting in Montreal and reconnect with colleagues and collaborators across academia, industry, national laboratories, utilities, and system operators,” He said. “The meeting offered an important opportunity to exchange ideas on how emerging technologies and rapidly changing electricity demand are reshaping the future power grid.”
The IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting is the flagship annual conference of the IEEE Power & Energy Society and a premier international conference in the power and energy field. The 2026 meeting received a record 1,369 paper submissions worldwide, and this Best Paper recognition represents work among the top 5% of conference submissions.
This marks He’s fourth Best Paper Award from the IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting; her third consecutive Best Paper recognition at the meeting; and her fifth overall Best Paper Award.