UT ECE graduate student Chenchen Li recently won first prize in the 2013 FEKO Student Competition. Chenchen's research was "motivated by significant concerns in the radar community about the rapidly growing number of wind farms.  These concerns arose from the time-varying radar clutter caused by wind turbines that can interfere with radar detection and tracking operations.  Chenchen pointed out in his entry that it is important to understand the dynamic radar signatures from wind turbines in order to devise mitigation approaches."

UT ECE professor Andrea Alu has been named the recipient of the inaugural 2013 Franco Strazzabosco Award. The award recognizes an Italian engineer under 40 for his entrepreneurial courage in applying scientific discoveries to public advantage.

UT ECE graduate student Francesco Monticone received an IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Doctoral Research Award for his project proposal entitled "Molding the Scattering Response with Metamaterials and Plasmonics."

UT ECE professor Sarfraz Khurshid has received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his work on "Mera: Memoized Ranged Systematic Software Analyses."

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin (UT ECE) has joined a strategic partnership with BP to support several leading-edge oil and gas industry research projects. BP has committed $4 million to the partnership with the potential for increased contributions as new studies are identified in the future.

James Truchard, who earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1974, was recognized by Texas Exes on Nov. 1 with the organization’s annual Distinguished Alumnus Award.

Prof. Andrea Alu of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin has been elected to Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) “for outstanding contributions to the fields of photonic metamaterials, plasmonic phenomena and devices, cloaking and scattering suppression."

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has selected UT ECE assistant professor Zheng Wang as a 2013 Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering. Wang is one of 16 of the nation’s most innovative young scientists and engineers receiving the Packard Fellowship this year. Each Packard fellow will receive a grant of $875,000 over five years to pursue research.

The Wireless Networking and Communications Group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin is part of a team that has been awarded a $1.4 million grant for the development of a Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC) by the USDOT’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA).

UT ECE student Duehee Lee placed fourth in the IEEE Power and Energy Society Global Energy Forecasting Competition (GEFCom) in the Wind Power Forecasting Track. GEFCom2012 is the largest known energy forecasting competition to date. Not only does it bring together many new ideas to the energy-forecasting field from data scientists in many different industries but the competition data has already been used by scholars for benchmarking purposes. More than 200 teams submitted more than 2,000 entries focusing on hierarchical load forecasting and wind power forecasting.