News & Events

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

05-07-19

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

03-13-19

Professor Pietro Perona along with Caltech alumni David Hall and Steve Branson have won the 2018 U. V. Helava Best Paper Award from the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Their paper “From Google Maps to a fine-grained catalog of street trees” was selected for the award. The jury described the work in the paper as “innovative, and applicable for large areas of tree classification and inventories. The developed methodology would affect practices of urban tree management globally.” [Read the paper]

Tags: EE honors Pietro Perona alumni postdocs David Hall Steve Branson

03-06-19

Kavya Sreedhar, a senior double majoring in electrical engineering and business, economics, and management, has been named to this year's class of Knight-Hennessy Scholars, a graduate-level scholarship program founded by Stanford University. The program aims to develop a community of future global leaders to address complex challenges through collaboration and innovation. Sreedhar will receive a scholarship providing full tuition, room and board, and a living stipend while she pursues a PhD in electrical engineering. Her graduate work will be focused on circuits and hardware research for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. She is joined by 67 other students chosen from a pool of 4,424 applicants for the program's 2019 cohort. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE honors alumni Kavya Sreedhar

03-01-19

Caltech has recognized alumnus William Dally (PhD ’86, Computer Science) with the Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest honor regularly bestowed by the Institute. Dally was recognized “for his significant contributions to the architecture of interconnection networks. He developed much of the technology found in modern interconnection networks including wormhole routing, virtual-channel flow control, global adaptive routing, modern network topology, deadlock analysis, performance analysis, fault-tolerance methods, and equalized high-speed signaling.” [Caltech story] [Distinguished Lecture at Caltech]

Tags: EE honors CMS alumni William Dally

02-19-19

Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, has been awarded the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project, "Quadratically Nonlinear Micro-Resonators: Enabling Next Generation Photonic Devices and Systems." The CAREER program is NSF's most prestigious awards for junior faculty members. The level and 5-year duration of the awards are designed to enable awardees to develop careers as outstanding teacher-scholars. Awardees are chosen because they exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Tags: APhMS EE honors NSF CAREER NSF Alireza Marandi

02-14-19

Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering; Co-Director, Space-Based Solar Power Project, has won the 2019 Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Caltech's most prestigious teaching honor, the prize was established in 1993 "to honor annually a professor who demonstrates, in the broadest sense, unusual ability, creativity, and innovation in undergraduate and graduate classroom or laboratory teaching." [Caltech story]

Tags: EE honors Ali Hajimiri Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching