Professor bios

Professor bio: Vernon Cooray

Vernon Cooray (IEEE Fellow) is a senior professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Uppsala University in Sweden. He received the B.Sc. special degree in Physics with first class honours from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1975 and the Ph.D. degree in Electricity with special attention to electrical transients and electrical discharges from Uppsala University in 1982. From 1999–2003 he was the head of the Division for Electricity, Department of Engineering Sciences, Uppsala University.

Professor Vernon Cooray has supervised 24 Ph.D. thesis and 7 M.Sc. thesis. He has authored and co-authored more than 600 scientific publications and 17 book chapters. He is the editor of four books, The lightning Flash (2003), Lightning Protection (2009), and Lightning Electromagnetics (2012), The Lightning Flash (second and expanded edition, 2014) – all published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology in London. He is also the author of the monograph, Introduction to Lightning, published by Springer in 2014. For this book, he received the best book award from the Atmospheric Science Librarians International (ASLI) in 2015.

Professor Vernon Cooray was the president of ICLP from 2014–2021 and the recipient of the Berger award for his contributions to lightning research. In 2015 he was awarded the D.Sc. degree (honoris causa) from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, for his contributions to lightning research.

Professor bio: Farhad Rachidi

Farhad Rachidi (IEEE Fellow) received an M.S. degree in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1986 and 1991.

He was with the Power Systems Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, until 1996. In 1997, he joined the Lightning Research Laboratory at the University of Toronto. From 1998–1999, he was with Montena EMC, Rossens in Switzerland. He is currently a Titular Professor and the Head of the EMC Laboratory with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

He has authored or co-authored over 250 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals and over 400 papers presented at international conferences. He was the President of the Swiss National Committee of the International Union of Radio Science from 2012–2020. In 2019, he was appointed a member of the Academy of Sciences of Bologna Institute.

He served as the Vice-Chair of the European COST Action on the Physics of Lightning Flash and its Effects from 2005–2009, the Chairman of the 2008 European Electromagnetics International Symposium, the President of the International Conference on Lightning Protection from 2008–2014, 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 2013–2015 and a member of the Advisory Board of the IEEE transactions on electromagnetic compatibility from 2016–2021. He is a fellow of the IEEE and of the Summa Foundation, and a member of the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences.

Professor bio: Silverio Visacro

Silverio Visacro (Fellow, IEEE) received a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1980 and 1984, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992.

He is a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering Department, UFMG. He is also the Head of the Lightning Research Center, where he leads a team of about 30 researchers in the development of investigations and projects on electromagnetic modeling, lightning physics, grounding, and lightning protection, with a special interest in the lightning performance of transmission lines. He is the author of two books dedicated to lightning and grounding, and he has authored or co-authored more than 500 scientific papers published in reviewed journals and presented at international conferences.

He has led more than 20 investigation projects, most of them contracted by power utilities, and is responsible for a successful relationship between his University and industry. He is a special consultant on lightning protection, grounding, and transmission lines. In 2020, he was globally ranked as a “top 2% scientist” (2% most influent researchers) by the Stanford University.