Xiaoqing Xu, Texas ECE PHD candidate, has received the Gold Medal at the ACM/SIGDA Student Research Competition (SRC) in the Graduate category. The SRC is sponsored by Microsoft and offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research before a panel of judges and other students. The ceremony was held at the 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). As the first place winner of SRC, Xu will advance to the ACM-wide SRC Grand Finals, where he will compete with first place winners from other ACM SIGs.

The University of Texas at Austin's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering (Texas ECE) held the Fall 2016 Senior Design Showcase on Monday, November 21, 2016 in the Student Activity Center.

First, second and third-place winners were picked from all of the projects. Winning team members each received prizes generously provided by Keysight Technologies which included Amazon Echos, Apeman cameras, and smart watches. Winners were announced by Prof. Jim Wiley, who taught the course, and awarded by Prof. Gary Hallock.

Robert Heath, Jeff Andrews, and Alan C. Bovik have been recognized as Highly Cited Researchers. The Highly Cited Researchers from Clarivate Analytics is a list released annually that recognizes researchers from around the globe leading the way in the field of sciences and social sciences, and represents some of the “world’s most influential scientific minds.”

Deji Akinwande, Texas ECE associate professor, was selected as one of five inaugural Moore Inventor Fellows. This new fellowship program recognizes early-career innovators at U.S. universities with a high potential to accelerate progress in scientific research, environmental conservation and patient care. Akinwande is creating an atomically thin 2D-silicon structure known as silicene, which could provide a tenfold increase in energy efficiency for integrated circuits such as computer chips.

The award recognizes an individual serving as an active member of SIGMICRO who has contributed significantly to SIGMICRO and provided important service to the processor microarchitecture and microsystems community.

Prof. Tutuc was cited for contributions to the physics of 2-D electron systems.

Prof. Andrea Alù has been named the 2016 recipient of the Kavli Foundation Early Career Lectureship in Materials Science. The award is given to early career researchers who are within 10 years of having received a Ph.D, and have "already made a significant contribution to materials research and clearly have a promising future." This is the fourth time the award is given. Past recipients were affiliated with Stanford, Caltech and the Harvard MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Luca Tomescu, Texas ECE student, and his high school team won the 2016 National Merit Award for Innovation at The Real World Design Challenge. After winning the Texas State Governor’s Challenge, Tomescu and his teammates were flown to Washington, D.C. to attend the annual national level competition. The purpose of the RWDC is to provide high school students the opportunity to work within a team on real-world engineering challenges, with a current focus on the aerospace industry.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a four-year, $2 million grant to Andrea Alù of the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin to break the conventional ways in which light and acoustic waves propagate.

The app, which has over 1000 users already, has been rapidly gaining popularity amongst UT students.