Kaveh Niayesh is a Professor at the Department of Electric Power Engineering of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. He has a BSc and a MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran and a PhD also in Electrical Engineering from RWTH University, Aachen, Germany. During the last 15 years, Professor Niayesh has held different academic and industrial positions, including Principal Scientist with the ABB Corporate Research Centre, Baden-Dättwil, Switzerland; Assistant Professor with the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran; and Manager, Basic Research, with AREVA T&D, Regensburg, Germany, Associate Professor with the University of Tehran, principal engineer with ABB medium voltage, Ratingen, Germany. He has been mainly involved in the research and development of high-voltage high-current systems. He is the inventor or co-inventor of 16 patents and has more than 95 journal and conference publications on current interruptionsand limitations, vacuum and gaseous discharges, plasma modelling and diagnostics, switching transients, and pulsed-power technology.Magne Runde received the M.Sc. degree in physics and the Dr. ing. degree in electric power engineering from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway, in 1984 and 1987, respectively. He has been with SINTEF Energy Research, Trondheim since 1988, presently as a Chief Scientist. From 1996 to 2013, he was an Adjunct Professor of High Voltage Technology at NTNU. In this period, he taught a graduate course in High Voltage Equipment and supervised around 25 M.Sc and Ph.D students. In addition to current interruption and switching technology, his fields of interests include electrical contacts, power cables, diagnostic testing of power apparatus, and power applications of superconductors. Professor Runde has been the convener, secretary and member of several CIGRÉ working groups and authored / co-authored more than 45 articles in peer-reviewed international journals and more than 55 conference publications.
