9/22/2020
Illinois ECE graduate student Phuc Huynh has been named as a 2021 Siebel Scholar, a prestigious program that recognizes the most talented graduate students taking on some of the world's biggest problems.
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Illinois ECE graduate student Phuc Thanh Huynh has been named a 2021 Siebel Scholar. The Siebel Scholars program recognizes the most talented graduate students at top universities in the fields of business, computer science, bioengineering, and energy science. Each year around 90 students are selected based on academic merit and leadership potential and receive $35,000 in support toward their final year of graduate study.
Siebel Scholars are examining some of today’s most pressing problems, advancing on solutions, and forming a lifelong community. Huynh is an Energy Science Scholar and wants to build a sustainable and energy secure future.
Huynh is currently focused on the creation of a highly efficient, reliable, and compact electro-mechanical conversion system for offshore wind energy harvesting. He also has an interest in electrical system integration and product diversification for wind farms.
“A globally sustainable future is essential and fascinating,” Huynh said. “As a power engineer, I have been innovating the renewable-energy harvesting technologies to produce low-cost and environment-friendly electricity. Interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial to broaden the impacts of innovations. Being a Siebel Scholar grants me access to a very unique personal and professional network that has the brightest engineering, science, and business talents. This community will provide me enormous resources to help speed up our transformation to a globally sustainable future as well as to spread my inspiration to the next generations.”
Outside of his research, Huynh has held multiple leadership positions. In 2017, he served as co-director for Power and Energy Conference at Illinois, and in 2018 he served as the president for IEEE PES/PELS/IAS student chapter at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Siebel Scholars program is funded and run by the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation. Thomas Siebel is an Illinois alumnus (BA History ’75, MBA ’83, MS CS ’85). Siebel is the chairman and CEO of C3 IoT, an enterprise PaaS and SaaS software company that enables companies to design, develop, deploy, provision, and operate large-scale IoT applications. C3 IoT applies the power of big data, advanced analytics, social networking, machine learning, and cloud computing to enable the rapid development of IoT SaaS systems.
Siebel was the founder, chairman, and CEO of Siebel Systems, one of the world’s leading software companies, that merged with Oracle Corporation in January 2006. Founded in 1993, Siebel Systems rapidly became a leader in application software with more than 8,000 employees in 32 countries, over 4,500 corporate customers, and an annual revenue in excess of $2 billion. Siebel serves on the College of Engineering boards at the University of Illinois and UC Berkeley. He is a director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.