The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has included a University of Wisconsin-Madison electrical engineer in its 2025 class of fellows—the highest distinction designed to recognize academic inventors’ accomplishments in patents, licensing and commercialization.
Daniel Ludois, the Jim and Anne Sorden Professor of electrical and computer engineering and the research and innovation director of the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium (WEMPEC), is breaking new ground in electric motor technology.
Ludois’ work focuses primarily on integrating novel materials, designs and techniques to enhance and create electrical and electromechanical power conversion devices across many different scales, from massive power grids to industrial automation and vehicles.
Ludois is developing new classes of power converters that use less of the copper and steel that conventional electrical systems rely on so heavily. To do this, he focuses on innovations using wide bandgap semiconductors, dielectrics, and advanced manufacturing to enable capacitive coupling, or the use of electric fields to transfer energy instead of magnetic fields. Ludois was the first to show capacitive coupling can be used to charge electric vehicles and support industrial motors.
He’s also developed a converter that could allow us to efficiently harvest offshore ocean wave or wind energy, and has revived wound-field synchronous machines, an older type of motor that, upgraded with modern materials, is as powerful as conventional motors without the need for expensive rare-earth permanent magnets.
Work on electrostatic motors, however, has brought Ludois the most attention. Inspired by designs that date back to the era of Benjamin Franklin, these motors rely on coulomb force, or electric charge, to produce torque—instead of the magnetic fields used by conventional motors. This means electrostatic motors can do away with copper windings, steel and magnets, and be made of low-cost materials like plastic, aluminum and ceramics. They also reduce electricity costs and maintenance.
A spinoff company called C-Motive, co-founded by Ludois and based in Middleton, Wisconsin, is currently commercializing these electrostatic motors. In July 2025, the company, which employs 30 people, raised $13.5 million in investment capital. It now has pilot projects with Rockwell Automation and other companies, with hopes of scaling up to other industrial applications soon. As a professor, he also encourages and supports entrepreneurship among his graduate students, with members of his team going on to found the electric motor manufacturer H3X Technologies and grid management company Skylark Energy Solutions.
While the business is taking off, Ludois, who is C-Motive’s chief science officer, says he has no plans to abandon the laboratory.
“I like to consider myself balanced between a classical theorist and analyst and a basement tinkerer. You can still make a difference by getting your hands dirty in a lab,” he says. “In this era where it seems like computers can do anything, I’m one of those old-school holdouts who thinks you never know what you’re going to be able to do until you try. You can find out all the things that the models and computers never accounted for. For me, the biggest aspect is to be creative. Research is still a human enterprise, and I’m just thrilled to continue to be a part of that.”
Gurindar (Guri) Sohi, a professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at UW-Madison, has also been named fellow of the NAI. Ludois and Sohi are among 185 inventors in the NAI’s 2025 cohort, which collectively holds more than 5,300 U.S. patents. With the addition of Ludois and Sohi, UW–Madison now has 21 NAI fellows.
“The idea of being in this cohort is special, because this one pertains to creativity—and for me, that’s the intellectual aspect I’ve always aspired to,” says Ludois, who earned his PhD in electrical engineering from UW-Madison in 2012, joining the faculty soon after.
The NAI honor is the latest among many that have marked his career: He received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015, was chosen as a Gordon & Betty Moore Inventor Fellow in 2017, received UW-Madison’s H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship in 2023, and won Phase I and II awards in the Department of Energy’s 2024 InDEEP competition.
Ludois and the other new fellows will be honored at the NAI annual meeting in Los Angeles, California, in June 2026.