Archived Department News

Doug Werner and his research team along with Lockheed engineers are awarded with the 2014 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Harold A. Wheeler Applications Prize Paper Award.
Read more about the Werner paper and the award here.

Victor Pasko, professor of electrical engineering, along with Jianqi Qin, postdoctoral fellow in electrical engineering (pictured left), report their latest research in Nature Communications.



Read more about the Qin/Pasko article here.

Aylin Yener, professor of electrical engineering, and Kaya Tutuncuoglu, Ph.D. candidate, received the 2014 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications.


Read more about Yener's awards here.

Qiming Zhang, Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering, and his research team have recently discovered a class of ferroelectric ceramics that exhibit giant electrocaloric effect (ECE) near room temperature. ECE is the electric field induced temperature change in insulation materials which have the promise of high efficiency electric coolers with compact size for on-chip cooling as well as for air-conditioning and refrigeration. However, the very small ECE observed in the past presents the effect to be attractive for practical applications. The research has been published in Advanced Functional Materials. The article titled, “Giant Electrocaloric Response Over A Broad Temperature Range in Modified BaTiO3 Ceramics,” is authored by X.-S. Qian, H.-J. Ye, Y.-T. Zhang, H. Gu, X. Li, C. A. Randall, and Q. M. Zhang. The entire Zhang paper can be viewed online.

In addition, the publication selected the related illustration as the cover as shown above, which shows a device simulation of a flat panel chip-scale cooler, employing the ECE materials developed.

Aylin Yener, professor of electrical engineering, received the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society Premier Research Award. This award recognizes and rewards an individual whose contributions to scientific knowledge through research are exemplary and internationally acclaimed. A single award is presented annually.

Yener has been the principal investigator on a number of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. Her research interests are in fundamental limits of wireless networks, green communications, information security and network science. She has more than 200 publications in books, journals, and conference proceedings.

Yener currently serves on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society as its Treasurer. Previously, she was the chair of the Student Committee of the IEEE Information Theory Society in the years 2007-2011, an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications in the years 2009-2012, and an editor and a member of the editorial advisory board of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications in the years 2001-2012. Dr. Yener has also served as the technical program-chair for several symposia in IEEE conferences in years 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013, and 2014.

Pam Stauffer, administrative support coordinator for the department, recently was honored with the 2014 Award for Administrative Excellence. The award, established in 1970, is given to a faculty or staff member whose performance, methods and achievements exemplify the highest standards of administrative excellence.

Stauffer also recently won the Outstanding Staff Award from the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society. This award recognizes and rewards outstanding service by staff employees in the College of Engineering.

Pam Stauffer joined the Department of Electrical Engineering as the administrative support coordinator in February 2010. She began her Penn State career in the Office of the Dean in the College of Engineering shortly after she graduated from Bald Eagle Area High School in 1986. After several years, she joined the Department of Aerospace Engineering and, in 1991, accepted an administrative position in Nuclear Engineering at the Breazeale Nuclear Reactor.

Stauffer left Penn State in 1999 to be at home with her two young sons but returned to Penn State in 2000 in the Department of Geography as administrative support coordinator. Stauffer serves as vice president of Penn State Educational Office Professionals and will step up to president in July. She also serves on the Commission for Women and the Employment Issues subgroup. Within the College of Engineering, she served on the steering committee  and currenlty serves helping to develop the Staff Advisory Committee.

Julio Urbina, associate professor of electrical engineering, recently received the 2014 Joel and Ruth Spira Excellence in Teaching Award. This award, was established in 1983 by Ruth and Joel Spira, cofounders of the Lutron Electronics Company. The prize is awarded to a faculty member who had excelled in teaching and inspiring students during the current academic year.

Julio Urbina, associate professor of electrical engineering, has been selected to receive a Fulbright award to Peru. As a Fulbright scholar, Urbina strives to build an educational training program that leverages teaching between Universidad Nacional de Ingeniera (UNI) in Lina, Peru and Penn State. He will teach two project-based, experiential learning courses in the field of electrical engineering at UNI. Ultimately, Urbina will identify common goals and cooperative projects to sustain and maintain both an exchange of scholars and students between Peru and the United States. Urbina’s research at Penn State has been focused on developing radar systems using open source hardware and software tools, which includes a prototype of the next generation of meteor radars to study meteor reflections and its effect on the Earth’s upper atmosphere and also on space weather. The Fulbright program, established in 1946, was created to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of the more than 150 countries that currently participate in the Fulbright program. The Fulbright Program is one of the most prestigious awards programs worldwide.

Noel Chris Giebink, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, was recently awarded a grant through Air Force’s Young Investigator Research Program. The program is open to scientists and engineers at research institutions across the United States who received Ph.D. or equivalent degrees in the last five years and who show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research. The objective of this program is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering.

The research of W. L. Weiss Chair Professor Mohsen Kavehrad and his Center on Optical Wireless Applications (COWA)was showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. See here for more information and to read the entire article. Also click here to view the COWA website for more information on the center.

The research work presented by EE graduate student, Caitano da Silva, at the Fall 2013 meeting of the American Geophysical Union that was held in December 2013 in San Francisco, CA, received an outstanding student paper award. da Silva's work is devoted to model interpretation of formation of long lightning leaders in the Earth's atmosphere. His full length paper on this subject has recently been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. da Silva is working on his Ph.D. degree in Professor Victor Pasko's research group.

The Arecibo Observatory (AO) located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, is the world’s largest and most sensitive radiotelescope used for atmosphere, astronomy and planetary research. In recognizing its 50th year of service to the scientific community, the AO celebrated with a science symposium “50 Years of Scientific Achievement and Future Directions at Arecibo Observatory”.
The Department of Electrical Engineering had six attendees: James Breakall, professor; John Mathews, professor; Anthony Ferraro, distinguished professor emeritus; Julio Urbina, associate professor; Lynn Carpenter, associate professor emeritus and Thomas Collins, retired director of the electronics design services. Breakall, Mathews, Ferraro, and Urbina presented papers relating to the history of the facility.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named Srinivas Tadigadapa, professor of electrical engineering, an IEEE fellow. Tadigadapa was cited for contributions to microeletromechanical systems for fluidic and biochemical sensors.

Penn State announced that Amr Salah Elnashai will serve as the new dean in the College of Engineering, pending approval by the University Board of Trustees at the Nov. 22 meeting. Read the whole article about the new dean.

Professor Suman Datta will participate in a Penn State led multi university research initiative that is working to develop a computer prototype that can see the surroundings in the same fashion as the human brain's visual cortex with improved energy efficiency. With a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Datta’s research team is part of a seven-university group that will receive an NSF CISE Expeditions in Computing award, the largest single investment the foundation makes in computing science. The project envisions a holistic design of a machine vision system that will approach or exceed the capabilities and efficiencies of human vision, according to the foundation. This technology will enable computers to interprete visual content at three orders of magnitude enhanced efficiency than current technologies. Datta’s team is funded by more than $500,000 of the total grant. His team is harnessing many body interaction in correlated materials to fabricate analog processing elements as building blocks for next generation vision processing systems. Collaborating institutions include University of Southern California, Stanford University, York College of Pennsylvania, University of California-San Diego, University of California-Los Angeles and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Read the whole story about Suman Datta's research initiative here.

Mohsen Kavehrad, W. L. Weis Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering, and his research group have developed a LiFi system which may revolutionize location identification. The research, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, was recently chosen to be highlighted on the NSF website here.
For more information about Dr. Kavehrad and his research team, please see here.

Electrical Engineering’s Rebecca H. Ripley was the student marshal for the College of Engineering at Penn State’s summer commencement ceremony. She chose Jeffrey Schiano, associate professor of electrical engineering, to be her faculty escort. College of Engineering student marshals are selected for their outstanding academic achievement and contributions to engineering student life.

Dr. Raj and Jeannette Mittra were recently inducted into the Elm Circle of the Mount Nittany Society at Penn State. Elm Circle members are recognized for cumulative giving to Penn State that has reached or exceeded $5 million. The funds will be used to establish a graduate fellowship, professorships for both established and emerging faculty stars, support for the microwave lab, and a "fund for excellence" in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Mittra joined Penn State as professor of electrical engineering in 1996. President Rodney Erickson commented during the award presentation that Mittra is one of the first Penn State professors to join the Elm Circle.

Erkan A. Gurdal, Ph. D. Student at International Center for Actuators and Transducers (supervised by Professor Kenji Uchino) won first place in the student poster competition at the 2013 International Workshop on Acoustic Transduction Materials and Devices, held in State College in May. The title of the paper is “Influence of Doping on Hardening/Softening Mechanisms in (Na0.5K0.5)NbO3-based Lead-free Piezoelectric Ceramics.”

Zhiwen Liu, associate professor of electrical engineering, and his research team including doctoral students Perry Edwards and Chuan Yang have developed an optical spectrometer which has won one of three prizes in a wireless competition sponsored by the Vodafone Americas Foundation. The Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project is designed to spark innovation and seek the best "mobile for good" solutions. Their optical spectrometer is designed to be integrated with a mobile phone which can be used for breast cancer detection, monitoring surgical wounds and color analysis for assisting people with color blindness. As part of the award each of the three award winner is entered into a contest to raise additional funds through the crowdfunding platform, Indiegogo. The project which receives the most unique visitors on its Indiegogo campaign by midnight on April 21, 2013 will receive additional funds from the Vodafone Americas Foundation. Please visit the site to support Dr. Liu and his research team. More on the project can be found here.

Soheil Bahrampour, PhD candidate in electrical engineering, won best presentation award at the 10th Annual College of Engineering Research Symposium on April 2. The paper is titled as “Feature Extraction Methods for Target Detection and Classification.” He is jointly advised by Kenneth Jenkins and Asok Ray.

An upcoming book titled “The Shark’s Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation” includes an interview with Mohsen Kavehrad, the W.L. Weiss Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering. Author Jay Harman interviewed Kavehrad on a paper he published through a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/Air Force Research Laboratory project. The book is due out as a hardcover and audiobook in June. For the full story, click here.

Mohammadreza Amini Kashani, graduate student in electrical engineering, won best paper award at the 10th Annual College of Engineering Research Symposium on April 2. The paper is titled “A new general and tractable probability density function of turbulence induced fading for free space optical communications.” His adviser is Mohsen Kavehrad.

Emil Laftchiev, graduate student in electrical engineering, won best paper award at the 10th Annual College of Engineering Research Symposium on April 2. The paper is titled “Robust Map Design for Terrain-Based Vehicle Localization.” His adviser is Constantino Lagoa.

Theresa Mayer, Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Douglas Werner, John L. and Genevieve H. McCain Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering, and their research was recently featured in an article in Scientific Reports. View the Scientific Reports article here. Penn State issued the following news article about their research here.

A Penn State project, which includes several electrical engineering students, is one of 24 small satellites selected by NASA to fly as auxiliary payloads planned for launch between 2014 and 2016, the agency recently announced. For the full NASA story, click here.

Matthew Hollander, Ph.D. candidate, won the best student paper award at the Device Research Conference. His paper is titled "High performance, large area graphene transistors on quasi-free-standing graphene using synthetic hexagonal boron nitride gate dielectrics." Hollander is advised by Suman Datta in the electrical engineering department and Joshua Robinson in the materials science and engineering department.

Congratulations to Ram Narayanan, professor of electrical engineering, for being awarded the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society Outstanding Research Award. The award recognizes and rewards outstanding engineering researchers for accomplishments in advancing the frontiers of knowledge. These research awards are established to confer honor on individuals who, by their contributions to knowledge, have brought recognition to themselves, the College, and Penn State.

2013 Waynick speaker is Bill Murtagh, Program Coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Space Weather Prediction Center. It will be held on Friday, April 12 at 8:00 p.m. in 22 Deike Building. More information about the Waynick lecture series can be found here.

Shani Allison, a 2001 electrical engineering alumna, was one of seven Penn State alumni named Jan. 18 by the University's Board of Trustees as a recipient of the 2013 Distinguished Alumni Award. The award is the University's highest honor for an individual. Allison is a program management analyst for the Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, Mich., and resides in Novi, Mich.

Advait Kumar, a third-year electrical engineering student, was recently featured in a Penn State news article after he received an international award through his startup company, Swajal. The Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) awarded Kumar funding for his project that focuses on a cheap, clean drinking water supply for villages in the industrial belts in India. Read the full story about Advait Kumar here: http://live.psu.edu/story/63908#nw54

EE graduate student Sotirios Mallios was awarded a third place in the student paper competition at the 2013 National Radio Science Meeting of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), held from January 9-11, 2013 in Boulder, Colorado. Mallios' work is devoted to numerical simulations of realistic electrodynamic conditions associated with propagation of lightning discharges that lead to recently discovered bursts of very high energy photons (up to 100 mega electron volts) in the Earth's atmosphere called terrestrial gamma ray flashes (TGFs). Mallios is a Ph.D. student in Professor Victor Pasko's research group.

Caitano L. da Silva, Ph.D. student in electrical engineering, recently won an honorable mention at the Fall 2012 American Geophysical Union meeting that was held in December 2012 in San Francisco, CA. da Silva’s adviser is Professor Victor Pasko and his work is devoted to numerical modeling of a transition from non-thermal to thermal electrical gas discharge forms as relevant to formation and propagation of long lightning leaders in the Earth's atmosphere, that some time establish a path of electrical contact between thundercloud tops and the lower ionosphere.

The research work presented by EE graduate student, Jianqi Qin, at the Fall 2012 meeting of the American Geophysical Union that was held in December 2012 in San Francisco, CA, received an outstanding student paper award. Qin's work is devoted to quantitative explanation of recently observed morphological features in lightning induced transient luminous events in the middle atmosphere, involving upward and downward propagation of waves of ionization associated with filamentary plasmas called streamers. Qin is working on his Ph.D. degree in Professor Victor Pasko's research group.

Jeremy Turpin, graduate student in electrical engineering, recently was selected to receive an IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Doctoral Research Award. Turpin is a Ph.D. candidate in Doug Werner’s research group.

Doug Werner, John L. and Genevieve H. McCain Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering and his research team are highlighted in a recent MRI news article. Read the article here.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named Suman Datta, professor of electrical engineering, an IEEE fellow.Datta was cited for contributions to high-performance advanced silicon and compound semiconductor transistor technologies.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named Kenji Uchino, professor of electrical engineering, an IEEE fellow. Uchino was cited for his contributions to pizeoelectric and electrostrictive actuators and electromechanical energy conversion.

Suman Datta, Professor of Electrical Engineering, has been selected to receive the 2012 IBM Faculty Award. This internationally competitive award honors full-time professors who have an outstanding reputation for their contributions in their field.

The IBM Faculty Award is a competitive worldwide program which fosters collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research, development and services organizations and promotes courseware and curriculum innovation to stimulate growth in disciplines and geographies that are strategic to IBM. It comes with a monetary gift to further work in the field. For more information on Dr. Datta’s research, please visit his website.

Vishal Monga, assistant professor of electrical engineering, and his research team are featured in an article on Penn State Live. The research focuses on developing an automated method of classifying histopathological images using image recognition technology.

Graduate student Perry Edwards was selected to receive one of the Diefenderfer Graduate Fellowships from the College of Engineering. This fellowship is designed to support outstanding students who show potential to be innovative and entrepreneurial-oriented graduate engineers. Edwards is a member of Zhiwen Liu's research group.

Umamahesh Srinivas, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering, recently won the best paper award at the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society meeting. The paper, titled “Discriminative Graphical Models for Sparsity-Based Hyperspectral Target Detection,” is the collaborative research between Professor Vishal Monga’s research group and Professor Trac Tran’s group at Johns Hopkins University.

Early Monday morning, August 6, at 1:31am east coast time, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) will touch down on the Martian surface after entering the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour just 7 minutes earlier. Brian Schratz (BSEE ’06, MSEE ’08) will be in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s mission control room on landing day helping to call out the data as it streams down.

Wei Xu, Ph.D. student in electrical engineering, recently won an honorable mention at the American Geophysical Union meeting held in San Francisco, CA. The paper is titled “Estimation of source altitudes in terrestrial gamma-ray flashes produced during the stepping of lightning leaders.” Xu’s adviser is Professor Victor Pasko and his work is devoted to numerical modeling of relativistic runaway electrons produced by lightning discharges and related emissions of high energy photon bursts in the Earth's atmosphere known as terrestrial gamma ray flashes.

The research work presented by Zachary Stephens, at the 2012 Coupling Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico was awarded an honorable mention. Stephens's work is devoted to the automated classification of meteor reflections collected with VHF Radar systems. Stephens is an undergraduate student working with Professor Julio Urbina's research group.

Umamahesh Srinivas won the Best Student Paper Award at the SPIE Defense Security and Sensing Symposium. The paper titled, “High-range-resolution (HRR) ATR via non-negative matrix approximations,” is co-authored by Vahid Riasati, and Srinivas' adviser, Vishal Monga.

Noel (Chris) Giebink, assistant professor of electrical engineering, was awarded a SunShot award in concentrating solar power from the U.S. Department of Energy. For more information on Giebink's research, see here.

Two teams with electrical engineering students won awards at the Spring 2012 Project Design Showcase. Titled “The Boeing Company 3 – LED Strobe System” and sponsored by Jason Steiner, the team members included electrical engineering students Peter Gosch, Benjamin Haas, Patrick Lee, and Christina Miceli. The team won 2nd place in the Lockheed Martin Design Award for Best Project. Titled “Lincoln Labs/PSU Student Space Programs Lab – Emergency Aerial Communications System” and sponsored by Sven Bilen, the team members included electrical engineering student Siwei Feng, mechanical engineering student Greg Brulo, and computer engineering students Ivan Stalev and David Zhang. The team won the Boeing Systems Engineering Award.

Graduate students Sonny Smith and Jose Ramirez were selected to receive a Graham endowed fellowship for the 2012-13 academic year. The fellowship, administered by the Graduate School, recognizes students for their achievements to date and their potential for future success.

Emil Laftchiev, Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering, won the 2nd place paper award in the College of Engineering Research Symposium on April 5. His paper is titled “Terrain-Based Vehicle Localization From Real-Time Data Using Dynamical Models” and his advisor is Professor Constantino Lagoa.

NSF recently released 2010 rankings of science and engineering research expenditures. The Penn State electrical engineering department ranked 3 among all private and public universities! That is up one from a ranking of 4 in 2009.

Congratulations to Theresa Mayer on her recent promotion to Distinguished Professor.

The annual Waynick Lecture is April 12, 8:00 p.m. in 22 Deike Building. The speaker is Anousheh Ansari and she will be addressing “Space Commercialization and its Future.” The event is free and open to the public. For more information on the Waynick Lecture Series, see here.

Congratulations Professor Suman Datta for winning the outstanding research award from the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society. Datta will receive his award in a ceremony April 13 in Kunkle Activities Center.

The Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Optical Wireless Applications (COWA) is holding its first Industrial Advisory Board meeting on May 20-22 to discuss the potentials of the interdisciplinary research center, providing leadership to develop new generation of environment-friendly (GREEN), extremely wideband optical wireless technology applications, employing solid-state devices for communications, networking, imaging, positioning and remote sensing. The meeting will be of interest to engineers, leaders and executives in visionary companies that have a goal to extend and enhance their products and services with newly designed mm-wave and optical sources, transmitters, detectors and receivers. For more information, please refer to the center website.

The student chapter of IEEE placed 3rd in the Rube Goldberg Machine competition on Feb. 11. Led by team captain, EE senior Erik Bergstrom, and team co-captain, EE junior Grant Vandebrake, and sponsored by Nucor Steel, the team put in about 150 man hours into the building of the project. Held annually, the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest challenges students to use innovative ideas and problem-solving skills to design a machine that accomplishes an otherwise trivial task. This year's challenge was to design and build a machine that inflates and pops a balloon in 20 or more steps.

Mohsen Kavehrad, W. L. Weiss Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering, is co-chairing the “Optical Wireless Systems and Applications” topic for the IEEE Photonics Society Summer Topicals 2012. This conference aims to bring together researchers and engineers in emerging optical wireless communications, using visible lights and RoF technologies in addition to IR and UV communications or free space optics. Paper submission deadline is March 21. For more information, visit the website.

The research of Mohsen Kavehrad, W. L. Weiss Professor of Electrical Engineering, is featured in a Penn State Live article. Please read the article in its entirety here.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has approved an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Optical Wireless Applications housed in the Department of Electrical Engineering. The center, which will be directed by Mohsen Kavehrad, W.L. Weiss Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering, is a joint project with Georgia Institute of Technology. The five-year NSF grant will substantially impact research and innovation of optical wireless systems and applications designs. The goal of the center is to generate technology that enables manufacturing of specific devices with larger communications capacity, employing integrated opto-electronics device design with interfaces necessary to facilitate collaborative device, system, and network design. Members of the Penn State College of Engineering faculty who will participate in the center include Kevin Houser, associate professor of architectural engineering; Tim Kane, professor of electrical engineering; Zhiwen Liu, associate professor of electrical engineering; and Shizhuo Yin, professor of electrical engineering. Read the whole story.

Doug Werner, professor of electrical engineering, has been named the John L. and Genevieve H. McCain Chair in Engineering. Werner, who has been a member of the Penn State electrical engineering faculty since 1998, is the director of the Computational Electromagnetics and Antennas Research Laboratory and a member of the Communications and Space Sciences Laboratory and Materials Research Institute. Read the whole story.

Two electrical engineering student projects were awarded first place in the Lockheed Martin Design Award for Best Project at the Fall 2011 design showcase. The left picture is "Harnessing Human Energy" team sponsored by Harris RF Electronics. Pictured from left are Paul Mittan (Lockheed Martin), Clifford Pang (EE), Tuan Ngo (EE), Fernando Lara (EE), Michael Vanderwege (Harris), Jacob Huttel (EE), George Fouche (CSE), and Tim Wheeler (EE Assistant Professor).

The right picture is "4 Carrots - The Fitness Regulator" sponsored by Jonathan Tabolt. Pictured from left are Bill Orosz (CSE), Matt Quigley (EE), Jonathan Tabolt (entrepreneur), Jorge Calderon (EE), Aaron Walters (EE), Tim Wheeler (EE Assistant Professor) and Paul Mittan (Lockheed Martin).

To find out more about the projects, click here.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named John Mathews, professor of electrical engineering, an IEEE fellow. Mathews was cited for his contributions to radar observations of meteors.

A paper titled “Desynchronization Resilient Video Fingerprinting via Randomized, Low-rank Tensor Approximations” written by Vishal Monga, Monkowski Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Mu Li, graduate student in electrical engineering, won the top 10% paper award at the IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing in Hangzhou, China in October. The entire paper can be viewed here

David Wormley, dean of the College of Engineering, issues a message in connection with the statement from the interim president, Rodney Erickson. Read the message

Tom Jackson, Robert E. Kirby Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering is principal investigator for a project that received more than $1 million dollars from Dow Chemical for flexible and printed electronics. Click here for full story.

Ram Narayanan, Professor of Electrical Engineering, recently received an award through the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program. This program supports university research instruments and equipment that is necessary to carry out cutting-edge Air Force relevant research. Narayanan’s research pertains to compressive sensing and mutual information in radar imaging.

The research work presented by EE graduate student Sotirios Mallios at the 2011 Coupling Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) Conference held in June in Santa Fe, New Mexico was selected by a committee of judges for an honorable mention. Mallios' work is devoted to studies of different types of lightning discharges as sources in the global electric circuit. Mallios is working on his Ph.D. degree in Professor Victor Pasko's research group.

Drew Schmitt was the student marshal for the Department of Electrical Engineering at the spring commencement on May 13. He chose Jeffrey Schiano, associate professor of electrical engineering, as his faculty escort. College of Engineering escorts are selected for their outstanding academic achievement and contributions to engineering student life.

Harris3, a team that developed an automated solar charging station, received one of three first place Lockheed Martin Design Award for Best Project at the 2011 design showcase – a competition of 92 senior capstone design projects. Its team was comprised of electrical engineering seniors Steven Hughes, Hung Lam, Daniel Rothrock, Peter Tornegard and mechanical engineering senior Kevin Wenner. It was sponsored by David Brugger, and it was advised by Tim Wheeler, research assistant for electrical engineering.

Dheeraj Mohata (left) and Huichu Liu (right), Ph.D. candidates in electrical engineering, were recently awarded the prestigious IBM Ph.D. fellowship for the 2011-2012 academic year. The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards Program is an intensely competitive worldwide program, which honors exceptional Ph.D. students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study. These include: computer science and engineering, electrical and mechanical engineering, physical sciences, mathematical sciences, business sciences, and service science, management, and engineering.

The Bose Memorial Library was dedicated on April 22, at 3:30 p.m. in 204 Electrical Engineering West. Nirmal Bose, HRB-Systems Professor of Electrical Engineering died on Nov. 22, 2009, at the age of 69, while on sabbatical at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. Bose’s wife, Chandra Bose, donated his extensive library to the Department of Electrical Engineering. The library is housed in the Christopher Raspanti Memorial Digital Signal Processing Laboratory.

Kenji Uchino, professor of electrical engineering, was recently awarded the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society Premier Research Award. This award recognizes and rewards an individual whose contributions in scientific knowledge through research are exemplary and internationally acclaimed. These research awards are established to confer honor on individuals who, by their contributions to knowledge, have brought recognition to themselves, the College, and Penn State.

Vishal Monga, assistant professor of electrical engineering, has been selected as a faculty fellow for the 2011 Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship Program. The program offers hands-on exposure to Air Force research challenges through research residencies at participating Air Force Research Facilities for full-time science and engineering faculty at U.S. colleges and universities.

The department annual Waynick lecture was held in conjunction with the Student Programming Association on April 6 at 8:00 p.m. in Eisenhower Auditorium. The speaker was legendary astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium.

 

John Brown, professor emeritus of electrical engineering, died February 20. He was 85. Originally from Ellenville, NY, Brown received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Ohio University after serving three years in the U.S. Army.

Brown received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Brown University and joined the Penn State Ordnance Research Laboratory (now known as the Applied Research Laboratory) in 1951. His principal research interests were in the areas of statistical communication theory and underwater acoustics. Brown was a Fellow of the Electrical and Electronics Engineers being recognized for his contributions to statistical communications and underwater acoustics. However, his original doctoral dissertation concerned itself with transient heat transfer through laminar boundary layers. This single work became a seminal reference for jet engine designers using modern lightweight materials. Additionally, his research on sampling of heterodyned baseband electronic signals became the embodiment of understanding for the design of all modern day digital radios (telephones) and multimedia electronics including HDTV.

Brown retired in 1987, after more than thirty-six years of teaching and research at the Applied Research Laboratory and the Department of Electrical Engineering. Brown was an avid supporter of the University throughout his career and in his retirement. Brown and his wife, Marlynn “Lynn” Sidehamer, created a $50,000 endowment in their names to support programming for the Center for the Performing Arts. In 2010, the Center for the Performing Arts named Brown and Sidehamer recipients of its Distinguished Service Award.

Julio Urbina, assistant professor of electrical engineering, has been recognized by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with its Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. Urbina will receive $488,000 to support his latest research, “A Cognitive VHF Radar System Approach to Study Ionospheric Irregularities .“ The project is to build, test, and deploy a new coherent imaging radar system at Huancayo Observatory in Peru that will utilize cognitive sensing techniques in order to allow the radar to respond dynamically to the sensed environment by changing operating modes to optimize the received signal. The ionospheric observations acquired by the new radar will be used to address several questions regarding climatological dependencies of the generation and evolution of equatorial plasma irregularities. The NSF CAREER Program supports of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and resear ch within the context of the mission of their organizations.

The research work presented by EE graduate student, Jianqi Qin, at the fall 2010 meeting of the American Geophysical Union that was held in December in San Francisco, CA, received an outstanding paper award. Qin's work is devoted to numerical modeling of lightning induced transient luminous events and their effects in the middle atmosphere. Qin is working on his Ph.D. degree in Professor Victor Pasko's research group.

Raj Mittra, professor of electrical engineering, was awarded the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2011 James H. Mulligan, Jr. Medal. The honor recognizes contributions made to education, engineering research and research training in electromagnetic communication. He will receive the award next August at the 2011 IEEE Honors Ceremony in San Francisco.

Zikri Bayraktar, graduate student in electrical engineering, received the 2010 Award for Excellence in Electromagnetics presented by Dogus University and the Leopold B. Felsen Fund, Istanbul, Turkey. The fund, honoring the late Professor Felsen, Doctor Honoris Causa of Dogus University, recognizes Turkish students and researchers for outstanding research in the electromagnetic area with special consideration for publications resulting from research conducted in Turkey. Originally from Turkey, Bayraktar is a Ph.D. candidate; his advisor is Professor Doug Werner.

Robert Chau, Intel Senior Fellow and director of transistor research and nanotechnology in Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group, is the distinguished speaker on Oct. 25, 3:35 p.m. in 22 Deike Building. His presentation, titled “Future high-speed and low-power Nanoelectronics” is free and open to the public.

Read more

The research of Mohsen Kavehrad, W.L. Weiss Professor of Electrical Engineering, is featured in a paper titled "Optical Wireless Indoor Networks: Recent Implementation Efforts" authored by Klaus-Dieter Langer and Jelena Vuèiæ of the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications.

See the entire article here.

Jim Breakall, professor of electrical engineering, was featured in an article and on the cover of the August edition of QST Magazine, the official journal of the American Radio Relay League. The article includes Breakall’s work at Arecibo and highlights an event in April in which amateur radio operators were able to use the Aricebo radio antenna in a moonbounce. See the QST article here

L. Eric Cross, Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, is the recipient of the 2010 Von Hippel Award from the Materials Research Society (MRS). The Von Hippel Award is the society's highest honor and is "conferred annually to an individual in recognition of the recipient's outstanding contribution to interdisciplinary research on materials." Full story

Electrical Engineering graduate student Yangsoo Kwon, supervised by Professor Ram Narayanan, won the second prize in the Student Paper Contest at the 5th IEEE Waveform Diversity and Design Conference being held in Niagara Falls in August.

Ji-Woong Lee, assistant professor of electrical engineering, and his student co-authors Sanam Mirzazad-Barijough, Supratim Ghosh, and Tingting Lu presented three papers at the 2010 American Control Conference held in Baltimore, MD, June - July. Two of the papers received the Best Presentation in Session Award. These papers were on diverse research topics such as epileptic seizure detection, distributed consensus, and hybrid system stability.

Professor Victor Pasko presented an invited lecture on atmospheric electricity and electric coupling between the lower and upper atmosphere at the Workshop on Global Change and the Solar-Terrestrial Environment that was held in June at Aspen Global Change Institute in Aspen, Colorado.

The research work presented by EE graduate student Jianqi Qin at the 2010 Coupling Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) Conference held in June in Boulder, Colorado was selected by a committee of judges for an honorable mention. Qin's work is devoted to numerical modeling of lightning induced transient luminous events and their effects in the middle atmosphere. Qin is working on his Ph.D. degree in Professor Victor Pasko's research group.

Students from the International Center of Actuators and Transducers led by Professor Kenji Uchino received first place in the student poster competition at the 2010 U.S. Navy Workshop on Acoustic Transduction Materials and Devices. Seyit O. Ural, a Materials Science and Engineering graduate student produced the poster titled "High Power Characterization of Piezoelectric Materials" which introduced new innovative techniques to perform near-"in service" characterization of piezoelectric materials/devices. Ural shares this honor with Yuan Zhuang, Electrical Engineering graduate student, Menglun Tao (Wuhan University of Technology), and Safakcan Tuncdemir Electrical Engineering graduate student.

PhD student Xiang He and Professor Aylin Yener received the Best Paper Award at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC). The paper, presented in the Communication Theory Symposium of ICC, is in the area of Information Theoretic Security and is titled "A New Outer Bound for the Secrecy Capacity Region of the Gaussian Two-Way Wiretap Channel." ICC is the flagship conference of IEEE Communication Society being its largest international conference and was held in CapeTown, South Africa in May 2010.

Sebastien De Larquier and Zikri Bayraktar, graduate students in electrical engineering, received the A. J. Ferraro Graduate Research Award presented at the Communications and Space Sciences Laboratory’s annual Waynick lecture on April 30. De Larquier, who is completing his master’s of science degree, received the award for his research in remote sensing and space sciences. His adviser is Professor Victor Pasko. Bayraktar is working on his doctoral degree and received the award for his research in electromagnetics. His adviser is Professor Doug Werner.

David R. Smith was the presenter for the 2010 Arthur H. Waynick Memorial Lecture series on April 30 on the University Park campus. Smith is the William Bevan Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University and serves as director for the Center for Metamaterial and Integrated Plasmonics His talk was titled “Modern Day Alchemy with Metamaterials: Invisibility Cloaks and Superlenses.” The event was recorded and can be viewed here.

Congratulations to the Electrical Engineering Melvin P. Bloom Memorial Outstanding Doctoral Research Award winners: Zikri Bayraktar – Adviser, Doug Werner; Xiang He – Adviser, Aylin Yener; and Sheng Liu – Adviser, Qiming Zhang. The purpose of this fellowship is to recognize and provide financial assistance to outstanding graduate students who have been admitted to Penn State as candidates for a graduate degree in the Department of Electrical Engineering.

Congratulations to Aylin Yener, associate professor of electrical engineering, who is the recipient of a 2010 Penn State Engineering Alumni Society Outstanding Research Award. This award recognizes and rewards outstanding engineering researchers for accomplishments in advancing the frontiers of knowledge. These research awards are established to confer honor on individuals who, by their contributions to knowledge, have brought recognition to themselves, the College and Penn State.

Congratulations to Stuart Yin, professor of electrical engineering, who is the recipient of a 2010 Penn State Engineering Alumni Society Premier Research Award. This award recognizes and rewards an individual whose contributions in scientific knowledge through research are exemplary and internationally acclaimed. These research awards are established to confer honor on individuals who, by their contributions to knowledge, have brought recognition to themselves, the College and Penn State.

Optical Wireless Applications Workshop - The Electrical Engineering Department will be hosting a 3-day workshop on Optical Wireless Applications from June 8-10, 2010 at The Penn-Stater Conference Center Hotel. More information regarding this workshop is available here.

 

Ashkar Ali, Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering, was recently awarded an IBM Ph.D. fellowship for the 2010-2011 academic year. Award recipients are selected based on their overall potential for research excellence, the degree to which their technical interests align with those of IBM, and their academic progress to date. Ali will receive a stipend along with an educational allowance. In addition, he will be matched with a mentor from IBM who will work with Ali to strengthen and broaden his technical experience and network.

We welcome Pam Stauffer, administrative support coordinator, who joined the electrical engineering department on Feb. 15. Stauffer began working for Penn State in 1986 in the College of Engineering’s Dean’s office. She then worked for Aerospace Engineering and Nuclear Engineering before taking a short hiatus to be at home with her young children. Stauffer returned to Penn State in 2000 in the Department of Geography.

Keegan McCoy, senior in electrical engineering was selected to be a member of the NASA Student Ambassadors Program. NASA managers and mentors nominated the recipients from hundreds of former interns and fellows that were engaged in research and education opportunities across the agency. The NASA Student Ambassadors initiative further recognizes exceptional students. McCoy was an intern in summer 2009 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

The research of W. L. Weiss Professor Mohsen Kavehrad and graduate student Jarir Fadlulah on Wireless Optical Networks was recently featured in MIT's Technology Review Magazine.

 

The PSU EE Department is now accepting applications for our Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program for the summer of 2010. This 9-week research program is open to undergraduate US Citizens or Permanent Residents majoring in Electrical Engineering or a related field. The May 31 - July 30, 2010 program includes a salary plus free housing. The application deadline is February 19, 2010. For more information and an application, visit the REU website.

The paper titled “High-Speed Access over Copper: Rate Optimization and Signal Construction” authored by graduate students Ali Enteshari and Jarir M. adlullah, and W. L. Weiss Professor Mohsen Kavehrad won the “Paper of the Year” by the editors of Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute Journal.

Grant Marchewka was the student marshal for the College of Engineering at Penn State's fall commencement ceremony on Dec. 19, 2009. He received a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering. He chose Jeffrey Mayer, associate professor of electrical engineering, to be his faculty escort. College of Engineering student marshals are selected for their outstanding academic achievement and contributions to engineering student life.

Aylin Yener, professor of electrical engineering, is part of a new interdisciplinary research center at Penn State. The Communication Networks Research Center, focusing on the science of communication networks, was awarded approximately $35.5 million over 10 years from the Army Research Laboratory. The center, part of the new Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance, will perform foundational research on network science. The research focuses on the interplay among the social/cognitive, information, and communication networks. The center is led by Penn State, with partners including the University of California at Davis, the University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Southern California and the City University of New York. Several institutions also will be collaborating with the center including the University of California at Riverside, North Carolina State University, Stanford University and BBN Technologies.

The 56th ICAT/JTTAS Joint International Smart Actuator Symposium will be held on Oct. 6–7 at The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel. The focus will be on compact and simple structured solid state actuators and integrated sensors.You are invited to attend this symposium to share knowledge of current progress made in actuator/transducer materials, device designs and applications. If you are interested in presenting a poster at this symposium, please contact the symposium organizer as soon as possible. Company exhibitions & posters are also welcome.
Visit the conference Web site for registration and lodging information:
http://www.mri.psu.edu/centers/icat/news.asp

Julio Urbina, assistant professor of electrical engineering, and three Electrical Engineering students, Sandeep Kor, Ryan Seal, and Alexander Hackett are traveling to Bermuda in September to participate in the Charged Aerosol Release Experiment (CARE). The experiment, funded by the Naval Research Laboratory, Department of Defense Space Test Program, National Science Foundation, and NASA will provide a greater understanding of the radar scattering properties of noctilucent clouds and help in our understanding of space weather and possible global warming changes. For the complete article, please see the September newsletter.

Keegan McCoy, an Electrical Engineering senior, received the Anita M. Todd Internship Student of the Year Award for the 2008-2009 Academic year. McCoy worked during the summer 2009 semester as a systems engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where he developed an optical test plan at the Integrated Science Instrument Module level for the James Webb Space Telescope's fine guidance sensor and tunable filter.

---