2018 Officer Candidate Biographies

Steven Galecki – Candidate for Section Chair and Chair of Cleveland Joint Society Chapter (SP01/NPS05/EMB18/IM09)

Steven Galecki has been a member of the IEEE for over 30 years (Senior Member since 2016) but has been active as a volunteer for the past year as secretary of the Cleveland IEEE executive committee. He also is presently the manager of engineering for Checkpoint Surgical, a small medical device company located near Beachwood. Before his eleven years working with medical devices he has developed power control units for aircraft; MEMs and high voltage integrated circuits for industrial automation; power distribution for telephony; smart power devices for automotive and camera control circuits for Kodak.

He graduated from Purdue University in 1981 with a BSEE and has always looked forward to the challenges of a multi-disciplinary project.

Goals as chair of Cleveland IEEE:
This will be my second year on Cleveland’s Executive Committee and I am excited about continuing to explore all the possible ways that the IEEE helps us to engineer electronic technology, and to include fellow members of the IEEE in this exploration. Specific goals include presentations and networking events that help members assess their career (and how to manage their career), and other events to discuss the social impact of technology. I will also work with the technical societies so that each provides meaningful and interesting presentations to their members.

 

Abe Shahrodi – Candidate for Section Vice Chair and Chair of Cleveland Joint Society Chapter (PE31/IE13/IA34/RL07)

Abe Shahrodi has been an IEEE member since 1980 and elevated to Senior member in 2016.  He first volunteered with IEEE as the Secretary of the Columbus Section in 1986. Abe served as the Vice Chair of the Cleveland Section in 2017 and facilitated Power and Energy Society events for IEEE members throughout the northeast Ohio area. Abe is excited to expand upon these success in 2018.

Since graduating from University of Toronto in 1983 with a Ph.D. degree, Abe has played progressively advancing leadership roles, from Project Manager to Sr. VP, at various industrial companies across Canada and USA. As an innovator, leader and manager in power conversion industry, Abe has led numerous NPD efforts for products ranging from microelectronics to megapower energy supplies. Currently, as the Owner and Consultant at Power Magnetronics Solutions™, Abe specializes in fully customized power conversion equipment, transformers, reactors, harmonic filters, rectiformers and cooling systems. From 1983 to 1986, Abe published eleven original papers in refereed IEEE journals which, after 30 years, still make it to the top 4% of downloads at academia.com. Between 1992 and 1996, he received four US patents in variable speed AC drive, smart utility metering, energy instrumentation and gas turbine ignition. Abe is also an award recipient of Industrial Research Fellowship from National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

 

Maximilian Scardelletti – Candidate for Section Treasurer and Chair of Cleveland Joint Society Chapter (AP03/MTT17/ED15/AES10/COM19)

Maximilian C. Scardelletti is a Senior Research Engineer in the Communications & Intelligent System Design Division at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, OH. He received his BSEE and MSEE from the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, in 1997 and 1999, respectively. In 2016, Max received his Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. He has co-authored over 50 articles in technical journals and conferences. Currently, he is working on Wireless Sensor test beds for harsh environments. He is currently a Senior Member of IEEE, Chair of the IEEE Cleveland AP/ED/MTT Joint Chapter, and Treasurer of the IEEE Cleveland Section.

 

Chris Hrivnak – Candidate for Section Secretary

Chris Hrivnak is a Sr. Member of the IEEE and The Photonics Society. He is also a member of the IEEE Life Sciences Community, the IEEE Software Defined Networks (SDN) Community and the IEEE Internet Technology Policy Community and has participated in the IEEE Experts in Technology and Policy (ETAP) Forum. He graduated from Baldwin Wallace University and completed varied coursework at Cleveland State, Case Western Reserve, Gould Management Education Center, McKinsey, Hughes R&D Productivity, UT-Dallas, Tulane Law and Pepperdine Graziadio. Broad range of interests including but not limited to augmented intelligence, autonomous systems, additive manufacturing, information & communications technologies (ICT), life sciences, dark physics, etc.

 

Wenbing Zhao – Candidate for Section Member-At-Large

Dr. Zhao is a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Cleveland State University. He earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Santa Barbara in 2002. He has over 160 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Zhao’s research spans from dependable distributed systems to human centered smart systems. His research has been funded by the US NSF, US Department of Transportation, Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation, Ohio Department of Higher Education, and Ohio Development Services Agency. He has delivered more than 10 keynotes, tutorials, public talks and demonstrations in various conferences, industry and academic venues. Dr. Zhao is an associate editor for IEEE Access, and a member of the editorial board of several international journals, including Computers, Applied System Innovation, Internal Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems. Dr. Zhao is an avid professional event organizer. In 2016, he served as the conference chair for the 4th International Conference on Behaviors Education and Psychology (San Francisco, CA), as the program chair for the IEEE Smart World Congress (Toulouse, France). In 2017, Dr. Zhao served as the conference chair for the International Conference on Digital Technology in Education (Taibei, Taiwan), the International Conference on Vision, Image and Signal Processing (ICVISP) (Osaka, Japan), and the International Symposium on Computer Science and Intelligent Controls (ISCSIC) (Budapest, Hungary), and as the program chair for the 13th EAI International Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness. In 2018, Dr. Zhao is chairing ICVISP (Las Vegas, NV) and ISCSIC again. He is also serving as the conference chair for the 9th International Conference on E-Education, E-Business, E-Management and E-Learning (San Diego, CA), as the program chair for the International Conference on Computing and Big Data (Charleston, SC).

 

Lili Dong – Candidate for Chair of Cleveland Joint Society Chapter (CS23/C16)

Dr. Dong is a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Cleveland State University.  She earned her Ph.D. at The University of Alabama in 2005 and was elevated to an IEEE Senior Member in 2017.  She has over 40 peer-reviewed publications.  Since May 2009, Dr. Lili Dong has been the chair of IEEE CSS, Cleveland Chapter. In the past 8 years, Dr. Dong has successfully organized 15 IEEE seminars/workshops. She has invited keynote speakers from the United States and abroad. The seminars promote the networking and communications between academic researchers and industrial engineers, and improve the publicity of IEEE, Control Systems Society in Ohio area.  Since September 2008, Dr. Lili Dong has been the faculty advisor of IEEE-HKN, an honor society in electrical and computer engineering, at Cleveland State University (Epsilon Alpha chapter). Under her guidance, this student organization has grown significantly in student membership. Dr. Dong also trained student officers for the Epsilon Alpha chapter. She and the student officers have initiated about 180 new members in the past 9 years. On Mar. 25, 2017, Dr. Lili Dong was invited to be the key note speaker of IEEE SPAC Conference and gave an oral presentation entitled as “Lessons Learned as a Female Engineer” at the conference.