Editorial by the executive committee chair

The history of the conference is provided in this editorial. The Power Modulator Symposium's first meeting was in 1950, when it was known as the Hydrogen Thyratron Symposium and organized by the US Army. Its 25th meeting was held in 2002 as a joint meeting of High Voltage Workshop. On the other front, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory organized the first High Voltage Workshop in 1965, when it was called the Workshop on Voltage Breakdown in Electronic Equipment at Low Air Pressures. The 19th High Voltage Workshop was held in 2002, as a joint meeting with the Power Modulator Symposium. The joint meeting in 2002 was simply an attempt to save both conferences, as the technical content of both meetings were mostly defense research related for last few decades, and in 1990s both were suffering because of the funding decline in defense research. On the other hand, the researchers were also applying their research and ideas to industrial applications, and that paid off. The research field once again started to see many new ideas applied to emerging technologies, thus the merger of these two conferences turned out to be a very “natural” thing. The 2004 Conference was run under the name of IEEE Power Modulator Conference, but also included the High Voltage Workshop with its papers included in the Conference Proceedings. Until this time, the conference was only technically sponsored by IEEE, in which Power Modulator Symposium by IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) and High Voltage Workshop by Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation Society (DEIS). The combined conference held in 2006 was the 1st conference that had the full financial sponsorship of IEEE, through IEEE Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation Society, and added the technical Co-Sponsorship of the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Science Society (NPSS) in its sponsorship list of IEEE societies, making it reach many interdisciplinary researchers, scientists and practicing engineers. In addition to the conference Proceedings, since the 2004 conference, a special issue of an IEEE Transactions on repetitive pulse power and power modulators, have been published a year after the conference. The Special Issue covers the most recent work in the field in one issue while giving opportunity to those whose were not able to attend the conference and were not able to publish their work in the Proceedings of the conference. The next Special Issue will appear in the August 2011 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation (TDEI) on repetitive pulse power and power modulators, following the tradition. A list of previous IEEE International Power Modulator and High Voltage Conference, Power Modulator Conference (PMC), and High Voltage Workshop (HVW) Chairs is also provided.