The prestigious SEMIKRON Young Engineer Award 2021 goes to Dr.-Ing. Jakub Kucka for his work as a research assistant at the IAL. Together with Prof. Mertens, Power Electronics Department, he invented and researched the revolutionary quasi-two-level operation for modular multilevel converters. This enables medium-voltage converters for large drives that can be assembled modularly from modules and are particularly reliable, cost- and space-saving. The award was presented at a general meeting of the European Center for Power Electronics in October 2021.