Carnegie Mellon PhD ECE graduate student Sanja Cvijic won the Second Prize for the Best Paper and Presentation at the North American Power Symposium (NAPS'2011) held in Boston on Aug 5-6, 2011 http://www.naps2011.org/#/HOME-01-00/. The paper is co-authored with her thesis advisor Prof. Marija Ilic. The paper is entitled ``On Limits to Graph-Theoretic Approaches in Electric Power Systems " and it concerns fundamental differences between transportation and electric circuit networks which make it hard to directly draw on the rich literature in operations research. The paper proposed a sequence of unique transformations which map a physical meshed network into a non-physical tree-structured network. Optimization is done using well-established methods for transportation network in this nonphysical network and the results are mapped uniquely back to the physical network. The method is an outgrowth of the old diakoptics method originated by Gabriel Kron and further developed by Harvey Happ for applications to electric power system decomposition. The award winning paper by Sanja Cvijic finally demistifies the complexity of these old methods and introduces mappings which can be automated for systematic optimization. Sanja is spending her second summer with IBM and was selected to become an IBM Fellow for the academic 2011-2012. Congratulations to Sanja for the job well done!