The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin hosted its ECE Honors dinner on Monday, December 11 at the AT&T Conference Center to honor the inaugural inductees into the Distinguished Alumni Academy and Faculty honorees. 

Prof. David Soloveichik, along with Niranjan Srinivas, have successfully constructed a first-of-its-kind chemical oscillator that uses DNA components — and no proteins, enzymes or other cellular components — demonstrating that DNA alone is capable of complex behavior.

Prof. Robert Heath of Texas ECE has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.

Two teams of Texas ECE students who participated in the Startup track of the Texas ECE Capstone Design Competition were recognized with awards at The Selig Entrepreneurship Prize Competition held by the Innovation Center in the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin.

The award "Honors a person who, over a period of years, has made outstanding technical contributions to theory and/or practice in technical areas within the scope of the Society, as demonstrated by publications, patents, or recognized impact on the field."

Prof. Al Bovik of Texas ECE and his former students Anish Mittal and Rajiv Soundararajan have received the 2017 Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award for their paper " “Making a “Completely Blind” Image Quality Analyzer."

Texas ECE PhD student Meng Li won the First Place Gold Medal at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA) Student Research Competition held at the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). His research competition title is "Design-for-Security Techniques for Hardware IP Supply Chain Protection”. 

The BBC recently featured the work of Texas ECE professor Deji Akinwande on the graphene tattoo:

A graphene-based tattoo that could function as a wearable electronic device to monitor health has been developed at the University of Texas.

Gold is often used in electronic components, but graphene is more conductive, can be hundreds of times thinner and allows the tattoo to wrinkle naturally with skin.

It is hoped that as the cost of graphene falls, such tattoos will become affordable for medical use.

Deji Akinwande, associate professor at Texas ECE, has been elected a 2017 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). Prof Akinwande is being recognized for “contributions to the physical study and development of scalable uniform monolayer graphene synthesis on wafer scale substrates, and the realization of gigahertz flexible and wearable two-dimensional devices, circuits and systems.”

Prof. Robert Heath, a Professor in Texas ECE, gave the 2017 Dean W. Lytle Lecture at the University of Washington Department of Electrical Engineering on Monday, October 2, 2017. The Dean W. Lytle Electrical Engineering Endowed Lecture Series is “a premiere annual event, featuring internationally-renowned researchers in the field of communications and signal processing.”