Dr. Francesco Monticone was awarded the inaugural Margarida Jacome Dissertation Prize for his dissertation “Scattering Engineering at the Extreme with Metamaterials, Metasurfaces, and Nanostructures." Dr. Monticone was advised by Dr. Andrea Alù and is currently an assistant professor at Cornell University. Dr. Lizy John presented Dr. Monticone with the award.
Francesco joined The University of Texas at Austin in 2011. He worked as a Graduate Research Assistant in the Metamaterials and Plasmonics Research Group with Dr. Andrea Alù. Francesco’s research mainly focused on electromagnetic metamaterials and plasmonics with applications ranging from microwaves to optical frequencies and with high scientific and industrial impact. While at Texas ECE, Dr, Monticone was honored with the IEEE Photonics Graduate Student Fellowship, the Omer Lindsey Bruce Graduate Fellowship, and the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Doctoral Research Award. He also received the Best Student Paper Award at the Metamaterials 2013 conference in Bordeaux, France. He received his PhD in 2016.
The Dissertation Prize honors the late Dr. Margarida Jacome, who passed away in 2007. Dr. Jacome earned her PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 1993 and was a professor and Temple Foundation Fellow at Texas ECE. Her research focused on embedded computing, hardware/software co-design, and high-level synthesis. Throughout her academic career, Dr. Jacome demonstrated exceptional excellence in both research and teaching. She had been internationally recognized and awarded numerous distinguished awards in both areas. She was the recipient of the Award of Excellence in Education, Research, and Service to Students from the Halliburton Foundation in 1998. She had been General Dynamics Endowed Faculty Fellow in Electrical Engineering since 2000. She received the NSF CAREER Award in 1996 for work on "design reuse and design process assessment." She was the recipient of the IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference Best Paper Award in 1992, and of the IEEE/CAS William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award for 2000. Her paper “Exploring Performance Tradeoffs for Clustered VLIW ASIPs” was selected for inclusion in “The Best of ICCAD— 20 Years of Excellence in Computer Aided Design.” She was also a recipient of the Best Paper Award for the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) for the period from January 2002 to January 2004.
Dr. Margarida Jacome
