September-October 2009
Mantu Hudait joins ECE faculty
Mantu Hudait joined the ECE faculty in September as an associate professor. An expert in materials science and microelectronics, Hudait is investigating new materials and device structures for energy-efficient nanoelectronics and alternative energy sources.
Dominion Power smart grid equipment installed in ECE lab
Smart-grid equipment donated by Dominion Virginia Power has been installed in the ECE power engineering lab. The equipment, worth more than $400,000, is being used in research on the U.S. power infrastructure.
Reed, Bose, Amanna to head $1 million+ Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence
An ECE team is partnering with Howard University to establish an Intelligence Community Center (ICC) Center for Academic Excellence. The initial award is $1 million, with an optional extension. Jeff Reed heads the effort and Tamal Bose and Ashwin Amanna are on the leadership team.
ECE leads $1.25 million Smart Grid Information Clearinghouse project
Saifur Rahman, Joseph R. Loring Professor of Engineering, is the principal investigator on a $1.25 million five-year contract awarded to Virginia Tech by the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop, manage, and maintain a public Smart Grid Information Clearinghouse (SGIC) web portal.
ECE team receives $3.2 million Solar Award Grant
ECE's Jason Lai and Kathleen Meehan have received a $3.2 million Solar Award Grant from the Department of Energy to investigate power conditioner technology for cost-effective approaches with high-penetration photovoltaic systems. The award uses funds made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Senior EE team wins national TI competition for subwoofer design
A team of ECE students took first place in a nationwide Texas Instruments competition, winning the 2009 Engibous Prize for their senior design project — a 200 W Class D subwoofer amplifier. The prize is awarded to the student engineering team who demonstrates the highest level of engineering analysis, originality, quality, and creativity in designs featuring TI analog integrated circuits.
Scales to study rocket-launched noctilucent cloud
A NASA rocket to be launched this week aims to create artificial noctilucent clouds and ECE's Wayne Scales will be using his models to study the physics of the dust cloud. MSNBC has featured Scales' work in an article on the mission.
James Thorp honored with emeritus status
James Thorp, the head of the ECE department from 2004 to 2009, has received the title of “Hugh P. and Ethel C. Kelly Professor Emeritus” from the Board of Visitors. Thorp is a preeminent scholar in electrical power, and his research won him and ECE's Arun Phadke the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2008.
ECE's Wang awarded Grant Dove Professorship
Yue (Joseph) Wang has been appointed the Grant A. Dove Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in recognition of his pioneering research accomplishments in the field of bioinformatics, medical imaging, and statistical signal processing.
Thorp, Phadke lead nation's efforts to protect power grid
Thorp and Arun Phadke are strongly involved in projects that amount to more than 50 percent of the available US Department of Energy stimulus awards to modernize the electric grid and to improve the security and reliability of the energy infrastructure.
ECE's Agah investigates insect secrets
ECE's Masoud Agah is on a multidisciplinary team investigating the internal fluid flow mechanisms of ground beetles, grasshoppers, and silk moths, hoping to improve microengineering by taking cues from nature. Agah is replicating the insectile fluid control with silicon fabrication techniques. The NSF's Science360 website is featuring their effort.
Bostian, Rondeau publish book on AI for wireless communication
Charles Bostian, alumni distinguished professor, has coauthored a new book, Artificial Intelligence in Wireless Communications, with ECE Ph.D. alumnus Tom Rondeau. See all textbooks published by ECE faculty.
July-August 2009
NSF Awards Space@VT $2 million to Improve Space Weather Understanding
A Space@VT research team is receiving a $2.0 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a chain of space weather instrument stations in Antarctica.
ECE ranked 14th in country
ECE is ranked 14th in the country for undergraduate programs in electrical and computer engineering by the U.S. News & World Report survey -- "America’s Best Colleges 2010." The College of Engineering is also ranked 14th.
Midkiff Begins as ECE Head
Professor Scott Midkiff begins as ECE Department Head effective August 10. Midkiff joined ECE in 1986 and has been on assignment at the NSF as a program director since 2006. He succeeds James S. Thorp, who has retired and continues his research work in power engineering.
First graduate from VT-MENA ECE Ph.D. program
Mustafa Elnainay has received the first Ph.D. in ECE from the VT-MENA program. VT-MENA enrolls graduate students from the Middle East and North Africa. The Arab Academy for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Egypt, sponsored Elnainay's studies.
May-June 2009
Scott Bailey promoted to Associate Professor
Congratulations to ECE faculty member Scott Bailey who has been tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
Steven Ellingson promoted to Associate Professor
Congratulations to ECE faculty member Steven Ellingson who has been tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
Kathleen Meehan promoted to Associate Professor
Congratulations to ECE faculty member Kathleen Meehan who has been tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
Cameron Patterson receives tenure
Congratulations to ECE faculty member Cameron Patterson who has been tenured at his currently-held rank of Associate Professor.
Jung-Min Park promoted to Associate Professor
Congratulations to ECE faculty member Jung-Min Park who has been tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
Sanjay Raman promoted to Professor
Congratulations to Sanjay Raman who has been promoted to full professor. Rahman is currently serving as a Program Manager in the Microsystems Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).
ECE grad student helps Tech radio station reach beyond Blacksburg
New equipment, donations, and years of hard work will return WUVT, the Virginia Tech student radio station, to the airwaves beyond Blacksburg. The 6,500 watt broadcast from Price Mountain begins transmission in July (Roanoke Times).
Student engineering team to compete in Smart Radio Challenge
For the third year, Virginia Tech's team has been selected to compete in The Software Defined Radio (SDR) Forum's Smart Radio Challenge. This year, Wireless@VT’s team will collaborate with the University of California at Irvine.
Alumnus Joe May inducted into the Academy of Engineering Excellence
Joe May (EE ‘62) has been inducted into Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering Academy of Engineering Excellence.
Alumnus Joseph Vipperman, Jr. inducted into the Academy of Engineering Excellence
Joseph Vipperman (EE ‘62) has been inducted into Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering Academy of Engineering Excellence.
March-April 2009
College of Engineering's Torgersen Award winners announced
Several graduating ECE students were honored at the College of Engineering's annual Paul E. Torgersen Graduate Student Research Excellence Awards.
Overcoming ignorance of terrain for predicting signal strength
Terrain affects communications signals and other electromagnetic waves, but topographical maps are not precise enough in many cases, according to ECE’s Gary Brown. His team has developed a quick, memory-efficient solution to this terrain-ignorance problem.
Extreme Voltage Scaling
ECE’s Leyla Nazhandali hopes to cut the energy consumption of some embedded systems by more than 90 percent with an extreme version of a well-known power-saving mode that is currently used in many digital devices including laptops.
Cognitive Radio Goes Jammin’
From jamming radio-triggered explosives to building the country’s first-of-its-kind cognitive radio testbed, Tamal Bose is applying signal processing technology to business demands of today and to the needs of tomorrow’s technology.
CPT selected as member of Center of Excellence
The Center for Photonics Technology (CPT) has been designated as one of the five members of the Pratt & Whitney Center of Excellence at Virginia Tech. CPT’s objective is to develop single-crystal sapphire fiber based sensors for multiplexed measurement of high temperatures at multiple locations.
Virginia Tech physicists and engineers search for new dimension
The universe as we currently know it is made up of three dimensions of space and one of time, but researchers in the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech are exploring the possibility of an extra dimension.
Midkiff Appointed ECE Head
Professor Scott Midkiff has been appointed ECE Department Head effective August 10. Midkiff joined ECE in 1986 and has been on assignment at the NSF as a program director since 2006.
Global MANIACs compete in futuristic wireless network
With inspiration ranging from information theory to mongoose behavior, university teams from seven countries and three continents tested network cooperation — and noncooperation — strategies in March at a competition organized by a group from ECE.
Modeling antiestrogen resistance in breast cancer
Jason Xuan and Joseph Wang have received a two-year $350,000 grant from NIH, jointly with Georgetown University School of Medicine for "Network-based Prediction of Antiestrogen Resistance in Breast Cancer." They are constructing computational models of antiestrogen resistance to identify new therapeutic targets for drug discovery.
December 2008-February 2009
Noise model overturns accepted RNA notions
By modeling the effects of noise on a system, a team of biologists and engineers, including ECE's Bill Baumann, discovered an inconsistency in two commonly accepted notions of RNA. Their results were published this spring in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Yue Wang invited to contribute to Encyclopedia of Sports Medicine
The International Olympic Committee has invited Professor Yue (Joseph) Wang to contribute to a volume on “Genetic and Molecular Aspects of Sports Performance” for the Encyclopedia of Sports Medicine.
Novel IP process speeds CPES technology transfer
The Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES) has developed an intellectual property process that is almost as fast as industry's and may be adaptable for other university research groups, according to CPES director Fred Lee.
ECE alum wins national dissertation award
Tom Rondeau was awarded one of two distinguished dissertation awards by the national Council of Graduate Schools for his 2007 Ph.D. dissertation on “Application of Artificial Intelligence to Wireless Communications.” This is the nation's most prestigious honor for doctoral dissertations.
Rahman appointed to committee that reviews NSF investments
ECE's Saifur Rahman, director of the Advanced Research Institute, has been appointed by the NSF to serve a one-year term on its Advisory Committee for GPRA Performance Assessment to determine whether NSF-sponsored programs are meeting the foundation's strategic outcome goals.
ECE prof heads $6 million grant to build space weather radar units
Mike Ruohoniemi is the lead principal investigator on a new $6 million NSF grant to build 8 new radar units to study space weather. The units will be part of the international SuperDARN network. Other participants on the project are Dartmouth College, University of Alaska at Fairbanks, and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. $2 million of the grant will go to Virginia Tech's Space@VT Group
Lab-in-a-box to go online
Kathleen Meehan is lead investigator on an NSF grant to expand ECE's Lab-in--box program online. She is joined by Bob Hendricks (MSE/ECE) and Peter Doolittle of the Department of Learning Sciences and Technology, as well as Richard Clark, head of the engineering program at Virginia Western Community College.
October-November 2008
ECE students are two-time winners in Smart Radio Challenge
A team of ECE students took first prize for one of three problems at this year’s Smart Radio Challenge competition at the annual Software Defined Radio conference on October 27 in Washington, D.C. The team was last year’s grand prize winner in the competition, which was sponsored by the SDR Forum Public Safety Special Interest Group.
Mili awarded $2 million grant for sustainable power, communications infrastructure research
Lamine Mili has been awarded a $2 million NSF grant to investigate the Development of Complex Systems Theories and Methods for Resilient and Sustainable Electric Power and Communications Infrastructures. The team, which includes ECE's Sandeep Shukla and Yilu Liu, plans to extend the scope and applicability of the highly-optimized tolerance approach to modeling cascading events across interdependent electric power and communications infrastructures while optimally placing resources for managing the risk of blackouts due to equipment failures or extreme natural hazards.
August-September 2008
Ledvina, Cornell team demonstrate how GPS nav systems can be duped
ECE's Brent Ledvina and colleagues from Cornell have built a system demonstrating how GPS signals can be spoofed. The team believes that current U.S. government countermeasures would not guard against their system. By demonstrating the vulnerability, the team hopes to devise methods against such attacks.
ECE team develops world's smallest antenna for UWB
ECE researchers have developed an efficient compact ultra-wideband antenna (CUA) for a range of home, automotive, medical, and military applications. “To our best knowledge, our invented antenna is the world’s smallest with more than a 10:1 bandwidth. It has more than 95 percent efficiency for signal transmission, and a fairly constant omni-directional radiation pattern,” said inventor and Ph.D. student Taeyoung Yang. Professors Bill Davis and Warren Stutzman are co-inventers.
Space@VT grows quickly
Space sciences research (Space@VT) has attracted five new ECE faculty members, including the SuperDARN Radar Group. The quickly growing center is featured in Engineering Now and a Virginia Tech news release describing the attraction of space sciences.
Pie-a-Prof helps IEEE students win "Society of the Year"
The student branch of the IEEE won "Society of the Year" from the university's Student Engineering Council. The society's many efforts include a Hands-On Practical Electronics (HOPE) program that teaches electronics to students in any major, a new Women in Engineering group, a big-sister-little sister mentoring program, as well as popular get togethers and fund raising, such as last spring's Pie-a-Professor event. IEEE website.
Virginia Tech wireless advances highlighted
From early work characterizing the propagation environment to advances in cognitive radio, Virginia Tech's Engineering Now news story describes advances in communications technology that were developed in ECE laboratories. See the full article on wireless technologies.
CPE wins undergrad research scholarship
Adedamola Omotosho (CPE ’09) was awarded a Virginia Space Grant Consortium Scholarship for his undergraduate research proposal, "MEMS Microengineering Research: Microchips for Cancer Diagnosis." Omotosho is interning with Intel this summer, plus investigating a BioMEMS tool for use in his research this fall at Colorado State University.
Undergrad gains DSP experience
through BAE Systems program
Gary Wheelock, (EE '08) was honored with a $2,000 stipend from BAE Systems for his work in digital signal processing (DSP). Wheelock proposed and completed an independent research project using a DSP board to develop a BPSK (binary phase-shift keying) transmitter and receiver. The equipment and stipend were funded by BAE Systems to encourage undergraduate students to gain hands-on DSP experience.
May-July 2008
Wang featured by Think Arlington campaign
ECE's Yue (Joseph) Wang serves as the face of Virginia Tech's National Capital Region for Arlington Economic Development's "Think Arlington" campaign. Wang is based at the Northern Virginia campus and directs the department's Computational Bioinformatics and Bioimaging Laboratory.
Nazhandali wins NSF CAREER award
Leyla Nazhandali has received an NSF CAREER award for her proposal, “Overcoming Power Challenges in Embedded System Design with Subthreshold-Voltage Technology.” Her work will allow her to explore ways subthreshold voltage technology can improve lives, such as reducing energy consumption of handheld landmine detectors. She is the 15th ECE faculty member to earn this prestigious award.
CPES designing sustainable house of the future
The CPES Future Sustainable Home project is focused on researching, developing and demonstrating advanced technologies that would create self-sustained homes. Read the Virginia Business article and the annual report story.
Shukla Receives Humboldt Foundation Award
ECE's Sandeep Shukla has received a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander Humboldt Foundation of Germany. The Bessel Award is available annually to no more than 25 scientists and scholars, internationally renowned in their field, who completed their doctorates less than 12 years ago.
Tront shares ed tools with scholars from India
Joseph Tront was a lead presenter at the 2008 Indo -- US Engineering Faculty Leadership Institute in Mysore, India in June.
Martin honored for career achievements
Harold Martin, a Ph.D. alumnus of ECE, was inducted into the College of Engineering Academy of Excellence in honor of his career accomplishments.
Xu named outstanding
new assistant professor
Yong Xu was named an outstanding new assistant professor by the College of Engineering in April. His research has earned major awards and more than 760 citations.
Hou named College of Engineering Fellow
Tom Hou was named a College of Engineering Faculty Fellow in April. The award carries a $5,000 stipend to be used for supporting the recipient's research.
Bell honored with teaching excellence award
Amy Bell received a 2008 Teaching Excellence Award by the College of Engineering in April.
Tront honored with
innovative teaching award
Joseph Tront was awarded the 2008 College of Engineering Pete White Award for Innovation in Teaching. His work with Tablet PCs has garnered international recognition.
January-April 2008
Phadke, Thorp awarded 2008 Franklin Medal. On April 17, Arun Phadke and Jim Thorp were awarded the 2008 Franklin Medal for Electrical Engineering for their work in protecting the power grid. View the Franklin Institute announcement and 3-minute video.
Jung-Min Park has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award to improve the security of cognitive radio networks. CAREER awards are NSF's most prestigious award for creative junior faculty members considered to be future leaders in their academic fields. Park is the 14th ECE faculty member to earn this prestigious award.
ECE's Masoud Agah has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award to develop a credit-card sized gas chromatography platform. The system is expected to enable in-the-field analysis of complex compounds within seconds. Agah is the 13th ECE faculty member to earn this prestigious award.
Arun Phadke has been honored by Eta Kappa Nu with the 2007 Vladimir Karapetoff Award for career accomplishment. Phadke and his colleague, Stanley H. Horowitz received the award for their technical contributions to the field of power system protection and control.
2007 News Items
ECE graduate students took top honors in the Inaugural Smart Radio Challenge at the 2007 Software Defined Radio Forum conference in November. Tech was the only school with 2 teams among the final 10 competitors.
Ph.d. student Ibrahim Chamas won 1st place in the student paper competition at the 2007 IEEE Topical Meeting on Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems. His paper: "A 5 GHz I/Q Phase-tunable CMOS LC Quadrature VCO (PT-QVCO) for Analog Phase Calibrated Receiver Architectures."
Gustina Collins was the first female African-American graduate student to earn a Ph.D. in ECE at Virginia Tech in December, while Stanley Atcitty was the first Native American male to earn an Ph.D. in ECE at Tech. Collins specialized in electronics and Atcitty in power.
With funding from the National Science Foundaton (NSF), Amy Bell is working with Engineering Education faculty to introduce freshman to the creative and beneficial aspects of ECE.
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NASA rocket launches with VT ribbon logo
NASA launched a Pegasus rocket Wed., April 25 displaying the Virginia Tech ribbon logo in memory of the tragedy here last week. The rocket carried the AIM spacecraft, which began a two-year mission to study noctilucent (night-shining) clouds. ECE's Scott Bailey is deputy principal investigator of the mission. The mission's principal investigator is ECE grad James M. Russell III, a professor at Hampton University.
We Remember
ECE mourns the victims of the April 16 tragedy, including computer engineering student Henry Lee. We also wish a full and speedy recovery to all the injured.
Schaumont and Xu win NSF CAREER awards
Patrick Schaumont received a CAREER award for his work on protecting embedded systems from side-channel attacks.
Yong Xu received a CAREER award for his work on nanoprobe technology, including for optical imaging and measuring vacuum field fluctuations. Twelve current ECE faculty members are NSF CAREER Awardees.
Scholarship established in honor of magnetometer expert
Friends and colleagues of Donnie King (EE '69) are establishing a scholarship in his name to honor his drive, expertise, and ability to inspire others.