The 2014 Award Recipient
William A. Chisholm, Ph.D.

For his contributions to understanding icing flashovers of insulators on power lines

Dr  William A. Chisholm is an expert in effects of adverse weather on overhead power lines.  He graduated with a BASc in Engineering Science at the University of Toronto in 1977, and joined the Ontario Hydro Research Division, now Kinectrics, in the same year.  He completed an M.Eng degree in 1979, as well as a 1983 PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of Waterloo.   He managed the incorporation of lightning location, overhead line thermal rating and insulator contamination monitoring programs into routine operation at Ontario Hydro.

After retirement in 2007, he carried out extensive research at the CIGELE Laboratories at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC) on electrical flashovers of iced insulators and live line tools, and has lectured or consulted in more than ten countries.  He contributed chapters to the EPRI Red, Blue and Gray books, and three editions of the CRC Press Electric Power Engineering handbook.  His quarterly columns in INMR magazine reach more than 70,000 readers.  With Masoud Farzaneh, he co-authored an authoritative IEEE/Wiley book Insulators for Icing and Polluted Environments in 2009 and co-authored in 2013 a McGraw Hill textbook, Electrical Design of Overhead Power Transmission Lines.   He made major contributions to several IEEE Standards (1243, 1410, 1783) as well as CIGRE Technical Brochures (299, 441, 549).  He was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2007, and in 2014 serves as Chair of the Power and Energy Society, Transmission and Distribution Committee.