UT ECE graduate student Yang Zhao has won the 2011 Best Student Paper award at the 2011 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium , ranking in 1st place at the Student Paper Competition in Spokane this week, with the paper Broadband Circular Polarizers Using Plasmonic Metasurfaces. Zhao is supervised by Dr. Andrea Alù.

This is the largest conference worldwide on Antennas and Propagation, with hundreds of students participating in the competition. Zhao received her award July 7th in Spokane, Washington.

There has been tremendous interest in cloaking technology using metamaterials, and Andrea Alù's group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has been very active in the field, putting forward two exciting possibilities to obtain drastic scattering reduction from moderately-sized objects.

Prof. Lizy John of UT ECE was recently honored with a 2011 Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award from Penn State University. A dozen top Penn State engineers were honored on April 21 at the 2011 Outstanding Engineering Alumni Awards ceremony at the Nittany Lion Inn on the University Park campus. The annual Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award is the highest honor conferred by the College and recognizes graduates who have reached exceptional levels of professional achievement. Prof. John received her PhD on computer engineering from Penn State in 1993.

Dr.

Prof. Lizy John of UT ECE was recently awarded a research contract from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). The research will investigate Power Consumption Based Multicore Task Scheduling and Load Balancing. Prof. John and her students will be working for the next 3 years on this project.

UT ECE professor Sriram Vishwanath has been awarded a $300,000 grant by the Army Research Office for Research in Social Networks. His research is focused on understanding the theoretical underpinnings of such networks, and developing algorithms that are inspired by an information theoretic analysis of social networks. The end goal of this project will be a suite of algorithms that can be used to infer social behavior between users from any database of social interactions.

UT ECE professors Seth Bank and Sriram Vishwanath received 2011 Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) awards. 165 awards were made to 83 academic institutions this year to support the purchase of $37.8 million in research instrumentation.

UT ECE is proud to announce the addition of Dr. Vijay Reddi to our faculty beginning September 2011.

UT ECE is proud to announce the addition of Dr. Zheng Wang to our faculty beginning on January 1, 2012.

UT ECE would like to congratulate all undergraduate and graduate students for Spring and Summer 2011 who were honored last week at graduation ceremonies from The University of Texas at Austin. Thank you for all of your hard work and dedication and UT ECE wishes you the best in your future endeavors.

See photos of the graduation ceremony on our Flickr page.

For the second year in a row UT ECE has won first place in the local Present Around the World competition sponsored by IET, The Institution of Engineering and Technology (the British equivalent of IEEE). The competition provides an opportunity for students to demonstrate their presentation skills and be recognized by this organization. UT ECE competed against two other schools, Texas A&M and the University of Houston. The talks are limited to 10 minutes, and judged 75% on presentation skills and 25% on technical content.