2011 ESL Research Award Winners Announced

Each year the ElectroScience Laboratory recognizes the research efforts of its students, faculty and researchers through the annual awards program. The 2011 ESL award winners are: Zheng Peng and Jin-Fa Lee, best paper; Gil-Young Lee, Dimitrios Psychoudakis, Chi-Chih Chen and John L. Volakis, best report; Kenneth E. Browne, best dissertation; and Andrew O’Donnell, best thesis.

The best paper award for 2011 goes to Zheng Peng, senior research associate; and Jin-Fa Lee, professor; for “Non-Conformal Domain Decomposition Method with Mixed True Second Order Transmission Condition for Solving Large Infinite Antenna Arrays.” The paper was published in IEEE Transactions Antenna and Propagation, vol. 59, pp. 1638-1651, May 2011. The awards committee noted that, “this paper takes a hugely complex and important topic and presents findings in a logical and readily accessible form. It additionally does this in a manner that enables rapid take-up and exploitation. In short, it is an outstanding exemplar of everything a research paper should be.”

(pictured at right: John Volakis, Andrew O'Brien, Zheng Peng and Niru Nahar)

The best report award winners are Gil-Young Lee, recent PhD graduate; Dimitrios Psychoudakis, senior research associate; Chi-Chih Chen, research associate professor; and John L. Volakis, professor and ESL director; for “Body Wearable Antenna Diversity Systems, Phase II Final Report.” In choosing this report, the awards committee noted that “the paper makes research findings and their implications clear, the quality of the research is demonstrable, and the superb use of graphics allows brevity in the text, creating a concise yet complete rendition of the research completed.”

(pictured at left: John Volakis, Niru Nahar, Dimitrios Psychoudakis and Chi-Chih Chen)

The best dissertation of 2011 was awarded to Kenneth E. Browne, recent PhD graduate, for “High Resolution Radar Imaging Via a Portable Through-Wall MIMO System Employing a Low Profile UWB Array.” The awards committee noted that this thesis brings a number of very advanced elements together in a single instrument. In choosing Browne’s paper, they noted that “Through wall imaging, MIMO and use of Ultra Wide Band waveforms are individually challenging topics and to combine them in an experimental context is highly ambitious. This PhD marries theory with experimentation thus providing a soundly based stock of new knowledge showing how fine detail may be discerned through optically opaque surfaces. It does this in a highly organized, well-argued fashion clearly showing where novel contributions have been made in both system fabrication and in high resolution, linear imaging.”

Andrew O’Donnell, graduate student, received the best thesis award for “On the Electro-Magnetic Scattering from Small Grooves in a Conical Surface.” The awards committee commended O’Donnell on his work, “This is an ambitious piece of work carried out for a master’s thesis. The seemingly simple act of creating a groove in a conical surface creates a hugely different scattering environment that needs care in its evaluation. This was achieved through Electro-magnetic computation and development of an analytic solution. The thesis is clearly written with excellent uses of illustrations, making it easily accessible to the non-expert reader.

(pictured at right: John Volakis, Niru Nahar, Andrew O'Donnell, Robert Burkholder (O'Donnell's advisor), and Andrew O'Brien)

The members of the 2011 ESL awards committee were Chris Baker, Ohio Research Scholar and professor; Niru Nahar, senior research associate; and Andrew O’Brien, senior research associate.