News & Events

07-24-19

MedE Professors Wei Gao and Lihong Wang are working on microrobots that can deliver drugs to specific spots inside the body while being monitored and controlled from outside the body. "These micromotors can penetrate the mucus of the digestive tract and stay there for a long time. This improves medicine delivery," Professor Gao says. "But because they're made of magnesium, they're biocompatible and biodegradable." [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights MedE Lihong Wang Wei Gao

07-08-19

Electrical engineering student Ray Sun, advised by Professor John Doyle, is a recipient of the 2019 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. His varied research interests encompass the union of hardware and software with particular emphasis on the intersection of digital systems, robotics, control systems, and aerospace. The Henry Ford II Scholar Award is funded under an endowment provided by the Ford Motor Company Fund. The award is made annually to engineering students with the best academic record at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Tags: EE honors Henry Ford II Scholar Award John Doyle Ray Sun

06-12-19

Meera Krishnamoorthy, a senior in electrical engineering, has received a National Physical Science Consortium (NPSC) Fellowship that will fund up to six years of graduate training. Krishnamoorthy will be enrolling in a computer science PhD program at the University of Michigan, studying artificial intelligence and machine-learning applications for health care, such as turning complex medical data into actionable knowledge that ultimately improves patient care. "Engineering is a great way to solve problems in multiple disciplines," she says. Krishnamoorthy's interest in machine learning was sparked by coursework and a research project she worked with Professor Yisong Yue, and her academic advisor has been Professor Steven Low. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE honors CMS alumni Steven Low Yisong Yue Meera Krishnamoorthy

06-12-19

The student winners of the 2019 Demetriades - Tsafka - Kokkalis Prizes were announced at the end of this academic year. Anupama Lakshmanan, advised by Professor Mikhail Shapiro has received the prize in Biotechnology. Her research is in engineering of acoustic protein nanostructures for non-invasive molecular imaging using ultrasound. Seyedeh Mahsa Kamali, advised by Professor Andrei Faraon has received the prize in Nanotechnology. She focuses on changing paradigms in optical design through engineering materials at the nanoscale. Linqi (Daniel) Guo, advised by Professor Steven Low has received the prize in Environmentally Benign Renewable Energy Source. His research quantifies the impact of transmission network topology in electrical power system robustness against disturbances and failures. Chris Rollins, advised by Professor Jean-Phillippe Avouac has received the prize in Seismo-Engineering, Prediction, and Protection. Chris studies the way that the Earth deforms gradually over periods of years and decades and uses this to shed light on how earthquakes work, where and how often they might occur in the future, and the hazard they may pose. Nicholas Flytzanis, advised by Professor Viviana Gradinaru has receive the prize in Entrepreneurship. His research is in engineering viruses to serve as next-generation gene therapy delivery vehicles for the treatment of human disease.

Tags: APhMS EE honors MCE CMS Demetriades - Tsafka - Kokkalis Prizes

05-27-19

Electrical engineering student Nikhil Poole, advised by Professor Azita Emami, is a recipient of the 2019 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. He is excited to be a part of ongoing research into low-power biomedical devices and integrated circuits with machine learning applications. In addition to CMOS design, he is also interested in hardware and software development for embedded systems. The Henry Ford II Scholar Award is funded under an endowment provided by the Ford Motor Company Fund. The award is made annually to engineering students with the best academic record in their discipline.

Tags: EE honors Henry Ford II Scholar Award Venkat Chandrasekaran Nikhil Poole

05-23-19

Srikanth Venkata Tenneti advised by P.P. Vaidyanathan is a winner of this year's Charles Wilts Prize, for his doctoral thesis "The Nested Periodic Subspaces: Extensions of Ramanujan Sums for Period Estimation." The Charles Wilts Prize is awarded every year to a graduate student in Electrical Engineering for outstanding independent research.

Tags: EE honors Wilts Prize P. P. Vaidyanathan Srikanth Venkata Tenneti

05-16-19

Professor Lihong Wang and Postdoctoral Scholar Dr. Junhui Shi have developed a new imaging technique that uses pulses from two kinds of lasers to take pictures of microscopic biological structures. This new approach, called ultraviolet-localized mid-infrared photoacoustic microscopy, or ULM-PAM, develops images of the microscopic structures found in a piece of tissue by bombarding the sample with both infrared and ultraviolet laser light. "Because ultraviolet light and infrared have different properties, we had to find special mirrors and glass that could focus both," Dr. Shi says. "And because no camera exists that can see both, we had to develop ways to see if they were correctly focused." [Caltech story]

Tags: EE research highlights MedE Lihong Wang postdocs Junhui Shi

05-13-19

Robert J. McEliece (BS '64, PhD '67), Caltech alumnus and Allen E. Puckett Professor and Professor of Electrical Engineering, Emeritus, passed away on May 8, 2019 at the age of 76. "Bob McEliece was renowned for his contributions to a wide range of problems in information transmission and storage," said EAS Chair Ravichandran. "His contributions are drivers for numerous applications in modern communications. He was an outstanding researcher and a beloved and inspiring teacher, mentor, and colleague." [Caltech story]

Tags: EE EAS history alumni Robert McEliece

05-07-19

Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, has received a 2019 Young Scientist Award of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). He was recognized “for contributions to nonlinear photonics, particularly his pioneering work on computing with networks of Optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) and demonstration of optical Ising machines, as well as half-harmonic generation of mid-infrared frequency combs.” [List of award winners]

Tags: EE honors APh Alireza Marandi

04-19-19

Undergraduate students Hongsen Qin, Emma Qian, Thomas Hoffmann, and Alexander Zlokapa (advised by Professors Aaron Ames, Erik Winfree, Jonathan Katz, Maria Spiropulu, and Yaser Abu-Mostafa) have won the Citadel Data Open International Data Science Competition. This winning team chose to investigate the optimal way to spend $1 billion to save lives from malaria and sanitation-related diseases, allocating funds for different prevention methods and optimizing budget breakdowns country by country. To quantify the socioeconomic impacts of their policy proposal, they modeled a variety of aspects from mosquito feeding cycles to climate change using techniques ranging from causal discovery methods to interpretable machine learning. The Caltech team was among 24 teams that were evaluated and questioned by a panel of experts including the former Chief Scientist of AI at Microsoft, a Princeton professor, and the chief of equities at Citadel. The Caltech team was chosen as the first place winner based on the depth, rigor, and comprehensiveness of their analysis.

Tags: EE honors CMS Erik Winfree Yaser Abu-Mostafa Aaron Ames Hongsen Qin Emma Qian Thomas Hoffmann Alexander Zlokapa