Ron Harley has been named the 2009 recipient of the IEEE Richard Harold Kaufmann Award for his contributions to monitoring, control, and optimization of electrical processes including electrical machines and power networks. This award honors outstanding contributions in industrial systems engineering and may be presented to the person(s) who has made exceptional contributions to electrical engineering in the industrial environment through the design or application of systems technology.

Dr. Harley has been the Duke Power Company Distinguished Professor in the School of ECE since 1999. He is the second faculty member at Georgia Tech to receive this award, with the first being Sakis Meliopoulos in 2005. This makes Georgia Tech the only educational institution to have two faculty members as recipients of this honor.