Short Bio:
Nelson Martins (BSc 1972, MSc 1974, PhD 1978, all in Electrical Engineering) has been a member of CIGRE since 1979 and of the IEEE Power and Energy Society since 1979 as a member and since 1998 as a fellow. He is actively involved with the IEEE/PES Power System Dynamic Performance Committee and also in the Brazilian shadow Study Committee C2. Currently, he serves as the Vice President (2023-2026) of the Brazilian National Academy of Engineering and chairs its Energy Committee.
His research interests and publications focus on small-signal stability, controller design, power plant testing, power flow control, FACTS and HVDC controls, power system harmonics, blackouts, and system restoration dynamics. He also specializes in modal analysis, large-scale eigenvalue methods, and model reduction. For 41 years, he worked at CEPEL, the Brazilian Electrical Energy Research Center, where he conceptualized and developed the small-signal stability software (PacDyn) for the first two decades. This software has been continuously developed and is now widely used by Brazilian generation and transmission utilities, as well as the Brazilian Interconnected Power System Operator. He conducted compact training courses on the software PacDyn across 18 countries, including several in Brazil, some of which were very brief. The executable version of the software PacDyn was exchanged for other foreign software executables, including the PSS/E package from PTI, the PSCAD software from the Manitoba HVDC Research Center, and the EUROSTAG software from EdF. Cepel used these programs to conduct research and development and to run comparison tests against its own software.
He has published approximately 200 papers, 50 of which have appeared in top-ranked journals, including IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, IEE Generation, Transmission and Distribution, CIGRÉ Science & Engineering, Linear Algebra and its Applications, and the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing. As of December 2025, his citation h-index is 27 in Web of Science (3,639 citations) and 43 in Google Scholar (8,821 citations). He is currently engaged in consulting work for a European electric utility regarding the ENTSO-E blackout that occurred on April 28, 2025.
The published papers, primarily in collaboration with Dr. Joost Rommes, focus on efficiently computing system poles, their residues, transfer function zeros, and reducing the model order of very large linear dynamic models. These contributions have had a significant impact on the power system industry and other fields in engineering and computational mathematics. Additionally, two papers, co-authored by Dr. J. L. Resende Pereira and others, address the Newton current-injection power flow in both single-phase and three-phase representations. These papers have become the leading solution methods for distribution-level networks that include generating sources.
Martins has been elected a member of the National Academies of Engineering in both the United States (NAE, 2015) and Brazil (ANE, 2015). He received the 2015 IEEE PES Prabha S. Kundur Power System Dynamics and Control Award and is an Honorary Member of CIGRE-Brazil, in addition to being an IEEE Life Fellow. The list of Nelson’s publications and other activities, as well as the MSc and PhD theses he supervised, can be found on the website: [http://nelsonmartins.com/]
Nelson’s ORCID ID: [https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1027-4115)
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