News & Events

02-07-19

P. P. Vaidyanathan, Kiyo and Eiko Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Professor Vaidyanathan was elected for “contributions to digital filter bank theory and design.” Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature," and to the "pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education." [NAE release] [Caltech story]

Tags: EE honors National Academy of Engineering P. P. Vaidyanathan

01-16-19

The Amazon Fellows program is the result of a partnership between Caltech and Amazon AWS around Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The 2018 Amazon fellows are Ehsan Abbasi, Gautam Goel, Jonathan Kenny, Palma London, and Xiaobin Xiong. Abbasi is interest in contributing to a deeper understanding of convex and non-convex learning methods in AI and is an Electrical Engineering graduate student working with Professor Babak Hassibi. Goel’s research interest is at the interface of the theory and practice of machine learning and is advised by Professor Adam Wierman. London is also working with Professor Wierman. She is developing efficient algorithms for solving extremely large optimization problems. The methods are applicable to distributed and parallel optimization. For example in a distributed data center setting, the algorithms are robust to unreliable data transfer between data centers and take into account privacy concerns. Kenny is a Computation & Neural Systems graduate student working with Professor Thanos Siapas on deep neural networks to identify and classify brain states. Xiong is a mechanical engineering graduate student who enjoys working on real physical robots, to make them walk, jump, and run in real life. He is advised by Professor Aaron Ames and their research is focused on robotic bipedal locomotion

Tags: EE honors MCE CMS Adam Wierman Babak Hassibi Thanos Siapas Aaron Ames Ehsan Abbasi Gautam Goel Jonathan Kenny Palma London Xiaobin Xiong

11-27-18

Fei Chen (BS ’11 EE) is on the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list for “building better microscopy technologies … that could help explain how complex tissues like the brain, made of a large collection of diverse cell types, are organized.” As an Electrical Engineering undergraduate student at Caltech Fei Chen was an Axline Merit Scholar for his outstanding record of personal and academic accomplishments. Currently he is a Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute, Harvard-MIT. [Forbes 30 Under 30 Full List]

Tags: EE honors alumni Fei Chen

06-18-18

Ryan Monroe, advised by Greg Hallinan is a winner of this year's Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize, for his thesis "Gigahertz Bandwidth and Nanosecond Timescales: New Frontiers in Radio Astronomy through Peak Performance Signal Processing." The Clauser Prize is awarded to students whose PhD thesis reflects "extraordinary standards of quality, innovative research, ingenuity, and especially the potential of opening new avenues of human thought and endeavor." 

Tags: EE honors Ryan Monroe

06-14-18

Behrooz Abiri, advised by Ali Hajimiri is a winner of this year's Charles Wilts Prize, for his doctoral thesis "Silicon Integrated Arrays: From Microwave to IR." The Charles Wilts Prize is awarded every year to a graduate student in Electrical Engineering for outstanding independent research.

Tags: EE honors Ali Hajimiri Wilts Prize Behrooz Abiri

06-14-18

Graduate students Ehsan Abbasi and Fariborz Salehi, working with Professor Babak Hassibi, have won a 2018 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship. They proposed a new algorithm for data recovery in Massive MIMO systems, which has a near optimal performance while being computationally efficient. Massive MIMO is the key enabler in the upcoming 5G data networks which promise considerably higher data rates in future generations of wireless networks. This year there were 174 submissions to Qualcomm for the fellowship and only 8 winning teams were chosen. Each winning team will be awarded a $100K fellowship and receive mentorship from Qualcomm engineers. [List of winners]

Tags: EE honors Babak Hassibi Ehsan Abbasi Fariborz Salehi

06-08-18

Electrical engineering student Shuqing (Erica) Chen, advised by Professor Michelle Effros, is a recipient of the 2018 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. She is interested in information theory and communication theory and is working on analyzing lossless source coding in the finite blocklength regime with unknown numbers of transmitters. 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 Michelle Effros Shuqing (Erica) Chen

05-18-18

Electrical engineering student Dong Hyun (Andy) Kim, advised by Professor Azita Emami, is a recipient of the 2018 Henry Ford II Scholar Award. He enjoys exploring the intersection of hardware and software, with a particular interest in intelligent 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 at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Tags: EE honors Henry Ford II Scholar Award Azita Emami Dong Hyun (Andy) Kim

03-23-18

Electrical engineering senior Michelle Wang, working with Professor Ali Hajimiri and Postdoctoral Scholar Alex Pai, has been selected to receive the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. She will spend a year abroad working on a series of projects related to the augmentation of humanity through machines. "Prosthetics for children need to be flexible, durable, and need to be able to grow with the child so that they don't have to be replaced constantly," she says. "But beyond that, we want to find ways to make them proud of their prosthetics. We don't just want to give them mobility but dignity." [Caltech story]

Tags: EE honors Ali Hajimiri alumni Michelle Wang Alex Pai

02-28-18

Lihong Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, has received the 2018 Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award from the Optical Society (OSA) for “invention of the world’s fastest two-dimensional receive-only camera; enabling real-time imaging of the fastest phenomena on earth.” The award recognizes individuals for their innovative and influential contributions to the field of biophotonics, regardless of their career stage. [OSA release]

Tags: EE honors MedE Lihong Wang