Dr. Bruce McCann was named an ECE Fellow at the Fall 2008 Fall Graduating Seniors and External Advisory Committee Banquet. Dr. McCann was recognized for his hard work and dedication to teaching at all levels. Dr. McCann has long taught freshman-level classes as well as masters courses to working professionals. He also made a large contribution to upgrading our senior design course, EE 364 and 464.

Recently, ECE presented the prestigious Gordon T. Lepley IV Endowed Memorial Teaching Award to Prof. Brian Evans. Dr. Evans was an obvious choice for both his classroom performance and curricular reforms. Almost 1,000 students have taken his real-time digital signal processing laboratory course where they translate theoretical ideas into working prototypes. He has also guided 100+ senior design students through their projects and supervised 16 Ph.D. and 8 M.S. students to degree completion.

Dr. Dean Neikirk won the External Advisory Committee's coveted High Gain Award for guiding the Department's graduate program for the last 9 years. Dr. Neikirk serves as the ECE Graduate Advisor. Until recently, he was the chairman of the Graduate Studies Committee as well. These jobs call for diplomacy, discretion, decisivness, and follow-through. I really admire Dr. Neikirk, says graduate coordinator, Melanie Gulick. He's served on committees all over the university, so he understands UT policy, but he's no bureaucrat. He tries to help every student succeed.

ECE alumnus James Truchard (Ph.D. '74) worked at UT's Applied Research Laboratories (ARL) for only two years before he, and fellow ARL employees Jeff Kodosky and Bill Nowlin, founded National Instruments (NI). Thirty two years later, the company has 4,000 employees, direct operations in 41 countries, and nearly $1 billion in sales.

Dr. Robert Flake has discovered the first non-sinusoid signal that doesn’t undergo dispersion on transmission lines that would normally distort a signal. The waveform, “Speedy Delivery” (SD), is a pulse with a positive exponential leading edge.

One possible use of SD to develop a new generation of high-resolution TDR instruments. TDR stands for time-domain reflectometer. TDRs send an electrical pulse through a metal cable encased in the foundation of a structure. Any impedance, such as a crack, sends the signal back towards the source.

Dr. Ted Rappaport has been recognized twice recently. He won an award at the Texas Wireless Summit—the 2008 AWA Wireless Industry Leadership Award.  He has also been appointed to the IEEE Board of Governors for the Vehicular Technology Society for 2009-2011. He already serves on the IEEE Board of Governors for the Communication Society (COMSOC).

Dr. Robert W. Heath, Jr. just won a National Science Foundation Award to research signal processing on special manifolds with applications to wireless communication. To meet the demand for wireless communication, wireless systems may employ new concepts such as multiple antennas, multiple user processing, transmitter coordination, and interference alignment. Implementing these techniques requires development of algorithms that exploit structure in the underlying signals. Dr.

Shayak Banerjee, a Ph.D. candidate being supervised by Professor Michael Orshansky, has won an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. The fellowships are awarded worldwide and are intensely competitive. Only 60 students were awarded this fellowship for 2007-08. IBM Ph.D. Fellows are awarded tuition fees, and a stipend for one nine-month academic year. The fellowship is usually followed by an internship at IBM.

Dr. Derek Chiou displays a motherboard that includes reconfigurable hardware he is using to develop a simulator that is thousands of times faster than current simulators. Once developed, the new simulator will enable computer architects and users to better evaluate the complex behavior of computer systems. Chiou received a $300,000 Department of Energy grant for the research.

Hurricane Katrina helped ECE power researcher, Alexis Kwasinski, formulate a new plan for the U.S. telecom system: a de-centralized telecom architecture that would have kept the lights and the phones on in New Orleans.