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Features
More than 30 years ago, Jim Thorp, ECE department head, and Arun Phadke, a university distinguished professor emeritus, first teamed up to fight power grid blackouts. Today, their technology and algorithms are used to keep lights on around the world, and they have been honored with the prestigious 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering.
ECE's Jung-Min Park supports efforts to deal with overcrowded unlicensed bands, but he wants to avoid security problems that plague other networks, such as the Internet.
Armed only with laptops, intrepid student explorers hunted this past November in what was possibly the world's most uncooperative ad hoc network &mdash and still managed to bag an elusive, quarry: a six-hop route.
Masoud Agah has developed a microchip etching process and a multi-column architecture that he hopes to use to push gas chromatography (GC) out of its traditional laboratory setting and into the field. He wants to shrink GC units from their present table-top size to a credit-card size so they can be carried easily for instant analysis of hundreds of elements.
Last year, Virginia Tech formed the Center for Space Science and Engineering Research, directed by ECE Professor Wayne Scales, for further understanding of fundamental space science, to help develop technologies to mitigate the impact of space weather, and to educate and train students in the field.
Thomas Rondeau (BSEE ’03, MSEE ’06, Ph.D. ’07) has been awarded the Virginia Tech 2007 Outstanding Dissertation Award for Sciences and Engineering for his dissertation, Application of Artificial Intelligence to Wireless Communications.