ESL STUDENT, FACULTY and RESEARCHER NEWS2015

Many thanks to Ryan Horns of ECE for photographing the events at ESL throughout the

year.

Lt. General John F. Thomson of the Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, OH, visits ElectroScienceLaboratory as part of his campus tour.

December 2015

Michael Wood, a Ph.D. student at the ElectroScience Laboratory, receives the Presidential Fellowship in Autumn 2015. The Presidential Fellowship is a highly prestigious award given by the Graduate School at OSU that recognizes the outstanding scholarly accomplishments and potential of graduate students entering the final phase of their dissertation research or terminal degree project. Michael is advised by Professor Ron Reano and he specializes in silicon Photonics.

November 2015

Congressman Michael Turner, the U.S. Representative for Ohio’s 10th congressional district, visited ESL on November 12, 2015, as part of his tour of The Ohio State University Labs and Centers. During this visit we focused on the research performed in partnership with Air Force Research Laboratory and Dayton-area research institutions.

November 2015

Michael G. Wood wins the 2015 Emil Wolf Outstanding Student Paper Award under the Integrated Photonics category at the annual OSA Meeting of the Frontiers in Optics (FiO). The OSA Foundation Emil Wolf Outstanding Student Paper Competition recognizes innovation, research excellence and presentation abilities of students presenting their work during the FiO Conference. Michael is advised by Professor Ron Reano.

November 2015

Cedric Lee receives the Doctoral Research Award from the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society for his project titled "Fully-Passive Wireless Implants for Unobtrusive Brain Signal Monitoring". Cedric Lee is advised by Professor John L. Volakis and Dr. Asimina Kiourti.

October 2015

Dr. Joel Johnson is now leading a NASA program to help navigate the manmade white noise caused by radio traffic signals, cell phones and other communication systems. The $5.6M project, “CubeRRT: CubeSat Radiometer RFI Technology Validation” builds on Dr. Johnson’s previous research on detecting and discarding manmade RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) from the Earth’s naturally fluctuating MW signals. It’s expected that successful RFI mitigation by CubeRRT will improve the possibility of MW radiometry in an RFI intensive environment and may also lead future systems to operate over larger bandwidth resulting in lower measurement noise.

October 2015

Shubhendu Bhardwaj received the Best Paper Award at the 37th

annual meeting of the Antenna Measurement Techniques Association (AMTA) held on October 11-16, 2015, in Long Beach, CA. The title of his paper is "Measurement of Propagation Losses in 300-350 GHz Band for Communication Link" and is co-authored by Dr. Niru Nahar and Prof. John L. Volakis.

October 2015

2015 Best CERF Poster Awards

1st place: “Novel Concepts for Slow Wave Structures used in High Power BWO’s and TWT Amplifiers”. Authors: Ushemadzoro Chipengo (presenter), RashedulZuboraj and John L. Volakis.

2nd place (1): “Ultra-Wideband Antennas for Satellite Communications up to Ku- and Ka-Band” . Authors: Markus H. Novak (presenter), John L. Volakis, Félix A. Miranda.

2nd place (2): “Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Radar”. Authors: Kyle B. Stewart (presenter), Abishek Mohan, Joel T. Johnson.August 2015

Jonathan Pozderac received 3rd place at the annual US/Canadian URSI student paper competition held on July 19 –25, 2015, in Vancouver, Canada. The title of his paper is "X-Band Beacon-Receiver Array Evaporation Duct Height Estimation" and co-authored by Prof. Joel Johnson and Dr. Caglar Yardim.

July 2015

Cosan Caglayan, a Ph.D. student at ESL, received a Doctoral Research Award from the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S). His award comes with a $2,500 Ph.D. fellowship, which is given to encourage students to pursue a career in the area of electromagnetics. Cosan is advised by Professor Kubilay Sertel.

July 2015

J. Landon Garry, a Ph.D. student at the ESL, received the 2nd prize at the Best Student Paper Award competition in the Signal Processing Symposium that was held in Debe, Poland on June 10-12, 2015. He presented a paper on the "Direct Signal Suppression Schemes for Passive Radar" which was also co-authored by Dr. Graeme Smith and Dr. Chris Baker.

July 2015

ESL played a significant role in the success of NASA’s New Horizon Space Probe between 2002 and 2006. The probe’s communication and imaging systems were measured and characterized at ESL’s anechoic chamber (shown in the photo on the bottom left) before their final integration into the spacecraft. ESL researchers (Willie Theunissen, Teh-Hong Lee) and alumnus (Ron Schulze) were involved in the design of the related antenna and imaging systems. Since July 14, New Horizon has been releasing images of its close encounter with Pluto.

Thanks to Dr. Rob Lee, Dr. Chi-Chih Chen, and co-inventors, Roland Tallos, Dr. Emre Koksal, your smart phone now gets extra boost from a phone case that extends its battery life up-to 30% by harnessing RF energy transmitted by your phone. The underlying research behind the product captured a commercial interest and soon led to the formation of Nikola Labs. In June 2015 Ohio Third Frontier Commission awarded Nikola Labs $100,000 to further develop the cell phone case.

June 2015

On December 2014 Markus Novak, aPh.D. student at ESL, was among 136 applicants who responded to NASA’sGCR Challenge on how to find ways to reduce astronauts’ exposure to Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR) while on long duration deep space missions. Currently, exposure to GCR limits mission duration to approximately 150 days while a mission to Mars would take 500 days, thus any further meaningful human exploration missions of space depends on finding a solution to this problem. He tied for 4th place for his creation of safe areas through particle trajectory simulations and received $ 1,000 monetary award.May 2015

The team NeuroCognetix received one of the highly coveted 13 spots in the Neuro Startup Challenge, held at the national level by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI) and the Heritage Provider Network. ESL Students (Safa Salman, now ESL Alumna; and Markus Novak) are part of the 5-member OSU team who moved on the 3rd and final phase of Start-Up challenge where they expected to launch their start-ups.

May 2015

Cosan Caglayan, a Ph.D. student at the ElectroScience Laboratory, receives the Presidential Fellowship in Spring 2015. The Presidential Fellowship is a highly prestigious award given by the Graduate School at OSU that recognizes the outstanding scholarly accomplishments and potential of graduate students entering the final phase of their dissertation research or terminal degree project. Cosan is advised by Professor Kubilay Sertel and his research areas include high-frequency device and circuit characterization methods, quasi-optical techniques, millimeter-wave and terahertz antennas, devices, and sensors.

May 2015

ESL Ph.D. students received the 2nd and 3rd place at the annual John D. and Alice Nelson Kraus Memorial Graduate Student Poster Competition held on April 23, 2015. Fifteen ECE graduate students competed for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place and received $500, $300 and $100 monetary prizes respectively.

• 2nd place: Satheesh Bojja-Venkatakrishnan. Advised by Dr. John L. Volakis. Poster Title: UWB Digital Beamformer Realization Employing a Novel On-Site Coding using FPGAs

• 3rd place: Andrew Kintz. Advised by Dr. Inder J. Gupta. Poster Title: A New Approach to Resolving Emitter Locations in the Presence of Antenna Manifold Mismatch

April 2015

ECE poster competition winners, (left to right) Andrew Kintz, Edwin Lee and Satheesh Bojja-Venkatakrishnan pose with ECE Alumni

3 teams of ESL/ECE faculty and students received awards from the AFRL/DAGSI Ohio Student-Faculty Research Fellowship program.

•Adam Kimura and Steven Bibyk, sponsor Castro: "Developing a Hardware Vulnerability Taxonomy and Fault Scoring System Framework for the Advancement of Trust Metrics" (Ph.D.)•Jeffrey Kula and John Volakis, sponsor Minges. "Reconfigurable Band Rejection and Bandpass Frequency Selective Structures “ (Ph.D.)•Jonathan Thews and Ronald Reano, sponsor Devgan: “ Investigation of RF Photonics for Advanced Signal Processing” (MS).

March 2015

Khadir A. Griffith, (ESL alumnus, M.S. 2010) received the “Science Spectrum Trailblazer Award” at the Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) event held on February 5, 2015 in Washington D.C. Khadir was a graduate student at ESL and was advised by Dr. Inder Jiti Gupta. His research focused on the "Performance Evaluation of RF Systems on Rotorcrafts".

February 2015

Ezdeen Elghannai, a Ph.D. student at ESL, received 3rd place for his poster at the Hayes Graduate Research Forum 2015 in the area of Engineering, Math, & Physical Sciences. His poster was titled "Systematic Technique to design Antennas for Wireless Communication Applications”. Ezdeen is advised by Emeritus Professor Roberto Rojas-Teran.

February 2015

The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Satellite that incorporates the remote sensing research results, obtained by Dr. Joel Johnson and his group at ESL (Jeff Ouellette, Alexandra Bringer, Mustafa Aksoy, pictured on the left), was successfully launched at early morning hours of Saturday, January 31. During its three-year mission, the SMAP Satellite will collect global observations of the vital soil moisture hidden just beneath the ground. With the help of its combined radar and radiometer instruments, SMAP Satellite will scan below Earth's surface of the top 2 inches to expand the understanding of a key component of the Earth system that links the water, energy and carbon cycles driving our living planet.

January 2015