Yateendra Deshpande, graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a member of EMPE lab won a Best Presentation Award in the PM Machine Drives Track at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) IECON 2012 conference in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Deshpande, along with his adviser Prof. Hamid Toliyat and Xiaoyan Wang from Texas Instruments, won the award for their paper, “Standstill Position Estimation of SPMSM — Robustness to Manufacturing Tolerances.” In their paper the researchers present a calibration method to overcome phase unbalance and eccentricity effects in zero-speed position estimation of surface-mount permanent magnet synchronous motors