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Instructor

Nikola Milivojevic

Bio

Dr. Nikola Milivojevic, Ph.D. is an energetic entrepreneur with a strong technical background and experience with managing research and development teams in the renewable energy sector. Nikola was a founder and CTO of SunTech Drive, setting the technology development strategy.
 
Prior to founding SunTech, Nikola was Vice President at Bright Energy, a think-tank in the energy storage space, Nikola led a research team that developed a compressed air energy storage system as a part of a Navy project in 2013/14. For the purpose of that project, Nikola put together the team of 20 engineers and successfully developed a 100kW, 400kWh compressed air thermal energy storage system, satisfying all Navy specifications.  Nikola was also the Director of Engineering at Southwest Windpower, a leader in the small wind industry, with more than a quarter of a million wind turbines sold. Nikola led a team of a dozen engineers, developing scalable turbine controllers and value engineering to existing units of a product line. Nikola led the certification testing with UL and GL, leading to the Skystream 3.7 product being the first turbine to be certified in a small wind turbine industry. This technology was subsequently acquired by Xzeres Wind and Primus Wind, both companies still sell those wind turbines worldwide.  Nikola was also a founder of MagDrive, a start-up company that was developing electronic controllers for wind and solar industries and in 2011 Nikola was a Principal Investigator on the project granted by WE Energies, a Wisconsin utility.
 
Dr. Nikola Milivojevic earned his Ph.D. from the Illinois Institute of Technology and received his MSc and BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Belgrade. He has published several journal papers and a few dozen conference papers on renewable energy and holds several patents. In 2005, Nikola led a team of students who competed against teams from around the world in the International Future Energy Challenge and took first prize at the finals in Chicago, IL. The President of Serbia, Mr. Boris Tadic, honored the team with the Mihailo Pupin Award, the highest national prize for innovation in technology and science. In addition, Serbian independent daily magazine DANAS listed Dr. Nikola Milivojevic as one of the 100 most successful Serbians in 2005.