توصیه‌نامه استاد برای دکترای برق

Letter of Recommendation

To the Graduate Admissions Committee,

I am writing to give my strongest recommendation for Arash Salehi, who completed his M.Sc. in electrical engineering under my supervision at Amirkabir University of Technology. In eleven years of supervising graduate students, I place Arash among the top three I have worked with, and the evidence for that ranking is concrete.

I first noticed Arash in my graduate course on nonlinear control, where he finished second of forty-five students. What distinguished him was not the grade but a habit: he submitted an appendix to his final project showing where his own controller failed — operating regions he had found by deliberately stress-testing his design. Students who hunt for the weaknesses in their own work are rare, and they are the ones who become genuine researchers.

As his thesis supervisor, I watched that habit mature into capability. His thesis developed a distributed secondary controller for islanded microgrids, and its defining moment came during hardware-in-the-loop validation. Two weeks before a demonstration to an industry partner, the testbed showed an oscillation that our simulations had never produced. Arash traced it within three days to an unmodeled communication delay, rederived the stability conditions to include the delay explicitly, and retuned the controller — then, characteristically, turned the failure into the strongest chapter of his thesis. That analysis became the core of a paper accepted at a leading IEEE conference, on which he is first author; a journal extension is under review. He earned a thesis grade of 19.5 out of 20, which our department awards to fewer than one student in ten.

Two further qualities deserve the committee's attention. First, his independence: after our weekly meetings, Arash consistently returned not only with the task done but with a considered argument about what should come next; by his final year I was advising him in the true sense rather than directing him. Second, his generosity: as my teaching assistant for two semesters, he rebuilt the linear control laboratory manual, and course evaluations for the lab sections rose visibly in the semesters he taught them. Three junior students in my group still use the simulation framework he documented before leaving.

Arash's goal of pursuing doctoral research in control of power-electronics-dominated grids is a natural continuation of work he has already proven he can do at a publishable level. I recommend him without reservation, and I am confident he will be an asset to your program. I would be glad to provide further detail by email.

Sincerely,

Dr. Farzad Nouri Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran