Dr. Brook W. Abegaz is an assistant professor in Engineering Science with a specialization in the field of computer engineering. Dr. Abegaz received the Master of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Netherlands in 2012, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Tennessee Technological University (TTU), USA in 2016. At TTU, he has successfully taught several courses including a Physical Electronics course and laboratory courses on Digital Systems, Computer-Aided Engineering, and Circuits I and II. Before joining Loyola Chicago, he has worked as a research fellow at two research centers at TTU namely the Center for Energy Systems Research and the Center for the Management, Utilization and Protection of Resources. He has industry experience at Intel Corporation in California, at Qurrent Energy in Amsterdam, and at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) in Delft, Netherlands.

Dr. Abegaz’s current research interests include modern sensor technologies and expert systems that could be used to improve the stability, the reliability, the resilience and the security of cyber-physical systems consisting of electronic systems, storage systems, and power systems. For instance, in converter-connected power systems, power, voltage and frequency perturbations are problematic since such networks are largely composed of continually dynamic sources that are distributed long distances apart to manage their stochasticity on an individual basis and are further prone to environmental variabilities and node and/or link failures. Manually controlling or even simulating the real-time coordination of large number of power converters in real-world power grids is not feasible at present. Dr. Abegaz’s research seeks to develop on-chip systems consisting of a processor, a memory and a control unit that could perform spatio-temporal network analysis and improve the perturbation tolerance of various nodes in power networks.