Francis (Yunhe) Hou

Bradley Department of ECE
Virginia Tech

Biography

Francis (Yunhe) Hou is an Associate Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech and a member of the inaugural class of Faculty Fellows of the Power and Energy Center (PEC). He received the B.E. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 1999 and 2005. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Tsinghua University, a postdoctoral researcher at Iowa State University, a researcher at University College Dublin, and a visiting scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. From 2009 to 2026 he was on the faculty of the University of Hong Kong, where he served as Deputy Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering from 2024 to 2026.

His research asks how power grids survive disruption and recover from it. It began with power system restoration after major outages, where his methods and tools have been used by system operators for over a decade. It has since grown to cover grid resilience against extreme weather and cyber attacks, and the planning and operation of a grid increasingly shaped by converter-mediated resources and very large loads such as AI data centers. Across these problems he draws on optimization, stability analysis, cyber-physical modeling, and learning-based methods for monitoring and decision-making.

He has authored four Wiley monographs and supervised more than thirty doctoral students. He was elevated to IEEE Fellow in the Class of 2026 for contributions to theory and decision support tools for power system restoration. His research has been supported by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the U.S. Electric Power Research Institute, and utilities and industry partners.

Positions

2026–Associate Professor, Virginia Tech
2024–2026Deputy Head, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Hong Kong
2017–2026Associate Professor, University of Hong Kong
2011–2017Assistant Professor, University of Hong Kong
2009–2011Research Assistant Professor, University of Hong Kong
2010Visiting Scientist, LIDS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2008–2009Researcher, University College Dublin
2008Postdoctoral Researcher, Iowa State University
2005–2007Postdoctoral Fellow, Tsinghua University
1999–2000Engineer, Wuhan Electric Power Company

Service

Honors