DR. Mo-Shing Chen was a world-renowned researcher and educator who built one of the United States’ largest and top-rated graduate programs in power systems engineering education. His annual two-week course, “Modeling and Analysis of Modern Power Systems,” became the power industry’s continuing education epicenter for more than 1,500 engineers from 400 universities, utilities, and manufacturing companies from around the world.
Chen solved vastly different and complex problems for all sizes of networks, from small rural electric coops to huge metropolitan areas like New York City and taught others not only how to solve such problems but also how to understand and identify the causes of problems.
In 1962, he accepted a faculty position at Arlington State College, which became the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) in 1967. The following year, he founded the university’s first research center, the Power Systems Research Center, later renamed the Energy Systems Research Center. In 1976, he received the inaugural Edison Electric Institute Power Engineering Educator Award. By the mid-1970s, UTA was consistently ranked by IEEE and the National Science Foundation as one of the top power engineering programs in the United States. He started the university’s first Visiting Scholars Program in which an established foreign power systems researcher would spend a year at UTA teaching and performing research. Chen produced the university’s first Ph.D. graduate and continued to produce the majority of M.S. and Ph.D. graduates for the university for many years. UTA awarded him its first Legacy Award in February 2023.
He published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, mostly in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, and was the principal investigator on 47 research projects. Many of his larger research projects were supported by Consolidated Edison Company of New York and the Electric Power Research Institute. He and his colleagues at the Energy Systems Research Center designed and created a scaled-down supervisory control and data acquisition system-controlled power system in the mid-1980s, which was valuable in their modeling of electrical loads for analyzing power system stability, resulting in the reduction and prevention of blackouts.
He was a Fellow of IEEE and recipient of the IEEE Centennial Medal. Eight universities in China and Taiwan named him an honorary professor, and, in 1997, the University of Nuevo León, Mexico, bestowed on him an honorary doctor of electrical engineering.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2023.3288575
Date of current version: 21 August 2023
1540-7977/23©2023IEEE