Student Awards

“2007 Roger A. Haken Best Student Paper Award”

Dana Weinstein receives the 2007 Roger A. Haken Best Student Paper Award at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) for the paper entitled, "Internal Dielectric Transduction of a 4.5 GHz Silicon Bar Resonator", co-authored with her advisor Assistant Professor Sunil Bhave. The award will be presented at the plenary session of IEDM 2008 in San Francisco.

“Intel Fellowship for 2008-2009”

Xuan (Silvia) Zhang, a member of Professor Apsel's Optoelectronic VLSI research group, receives the prestigious Intel Fellowship for 2008-2009.

"The Intel Foundation provides fellowships to outstanding Ph.D. students in Engineering, Computer Science and other technical majors focusing on semiconductor technologies at selected U.S. universities. In 2007, the Intel Foundation awarded 30 fellowships to Ph.D. students in research areas of interest to the semiconductor industry.

The Intel Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship Program is administered in conjunction with the Intel® Higher Education Program. The Intel Higher Education Program focuses on advancing innovation in key areas of technology, as well as developing a pipeline of world-class technical talent for Intel's future workforce and the global knowledge-based economy. To achieve this goal, Intel collaborates with top universities worldwide to expand university curricula, engage in focused research, and encourage student participation in research throughout their education. For more information, please visit http://www.intel.com/education/highered/index.htm."

This information was provided by the Intel Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship Program web page at http://intelscholarships.intel.com.

“2008 Where's the BOOM? Award”

The 2008 Where's the BOOM? Award, chosen by computer science faculty, went to CUmotive, a project using sensors attached to a person's body to control just about anything from a computer to a music system through body movements.

“IEEE GLOBECOM 2007 Wireless Communication Symposium Best Paper Award”

Mr. Amine Laourine and his co-authors, Mohamed-Slim Alouini (Texas A&M University at Qatar), Sofiene Affes (INRS, Canada) and Alex Stephenne (Ericsson, Canada) receives the IEEE GLOBECOM 2007 Wireless Communication Symposium Best Paper Award for their paper titled "On the Capacity of Generalized-K Fading Channels." The paper presents new results on the capacity of generalized K fading channels along with several transmission techniques.

As one of the two flagship conferences of the IEEE communication society, the 2007 IEEE GLOBECOM is held in Washington DC on November 26-30, 2007

Amine received his BS degree from Ecole Polytechnique de Tunisie and MS degree from University of Quebec. He started the PhD program as a Jacobs Fellow in Fall 2007 and joined the Adaptive Communication and Signal Processing (ACSP) group led by Professor Lang Tong. His research interest includes wireless communications, information theory, and signal processing.

“IEEE Electron Devices Society PhD Student Fellowship”

Tuo-Hung (Alex) Hou is selected to receive the IEEE Electron Devices Society PhD Student Fellowship for 2007

The PhD Fellowship Program was established to promote, recognize, and support graduate study and research within the Electron Devices Society's field of interest.

The fellowship will be presented at the 2007 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) on Monday morning, 10 December, at the Washington Hilton Hotel, Washington, D.C

Alex is Associate Professor Edwin Kan's Ph.D. student.

“Best Student Paper Award (Third Place)”

At the IEEE Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Montreal, Canada (August 5-8), Pukar Malla's paper titled "A Digitally Enhanced 2-0 Delta Sigma ADC" received Best Student Paper Award (Third Place).

Pukar is a Ph.D. Candidate and a member of the Cornell Broadband Communications Research Laboratory.

“Best Undergraduate Poster”

Roger Varney '09 ECE won Best Undergraduate Poster at the National Meeting of the NSF Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) Program in Santa Fe. A primary objective of CEDAR research is to understand changes in the atmosphere over short and long time scales. Varney works with ECE's James A. Friend Family Distinguished Professor of Engineering Michael Kelley; his poster was titled “Observations of Electric Fields Associated with Internal Gravity Waves.”

Roger is working this summer for SRI International at the Center for GeoSpace Studies, Engineering and Systems Division and will visit Alaska to participate in an experiment to determine the droplet sizes in the highest clouds in the atmosphere, some 85 km (50 miles) high.

“2007-08 Intel Foundation PhD Fellowship Award”

Congratulations to Rajeev Dokania on winning a prestigious Intel fellowship for 2007-2008. This is a highly competitive program with approximately 40 fellowships awarded annually. The two-year fellowship is renewable for up to two years pending review by the Intel Foundation. Rajeev received this award based upon his work in high efficiency optical interconnect within computing systems and low power electronics with Prof. Alyssa Apsel. [more about the fellowship]

“Best Student Paper Award”

Jonathan Felbinger, a first year graduate student under Les Eastman received the Best Student Paper Award at the WOCSDICE (Workshop on Compound Semiconductor Devices and Integrated Circuits) meeting in Venice, Italy. The paper covered a comparison of microwave AlGaN/GaN  HEMT's, designed and fabricated by Felbinger, with substrates of diamond and SiC. The Group4Labs supported the research on diamond, GE supported the research on GaN, and the research on SiC was supported by Northrop-Grumman and a MURI at UC/SB.

“The 31th Workshop on Compound Semiconductor Devices and Integrated Circuits, WOCSDICE 2007, was held in Venice, Italy, May 20-23, 2007.
The symposium is organized by Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova, Italy, with the aim of bringing together scientists and engineers working in the area of III-V compound semiconductor devices and integrated circuits for microwave, mm-wave, and optoelectronic applications. Both, invited papers and short submitted papers will be presented during the three day meeting, detailing latest results on electronic, optoelectronic, and integrated devices. The idea is to address new results in short presentations to initiate an intensive and fruitful discussion of the relevant topics. Despite of the European character of the workshop series, interested people from all over the world are invited to attend.” [read more]

“NOAA Medal of Appreciation”

General (Ret.) D. L. Johnson head of the National Weather Service presents ECE Student Alex Cerruti the NOAA Medal of Appreciation for his help in supporting the NOAA news conference “RESEARCHERS FIND GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM IS SIGNIFICANTLY IMPACTED BY POWERFUL SOLAR RADIO BURST”.

- Washington DC, April 4, 2007

“Circuit Cellar Magazine Featured Article”

If you’re having trouble soldering small chips, try reflow soldering. Ko and Kashif explain how to design a reflow soldering oven that won’t burn a hole in your wallet. Circuit Cellar magazine, issue #199, Feb 2007, page 46 [read more].

“Circuit Cellar Magazine Featured Article”

Craig and Ricardo designed an RFID-based proximity security system for use with identification cards. The system communicates with an administrator PC via a serial communications link and HyperTerminal. Circuit Cellar magazine, issue #199, Feb 2007, p. 24 [read more]

“Circuit Cellar Magazine Featured Article”

Abigail designed a microcontroller-based, self-powered solar data logger that uses a photodiode to measure solar insolation levels. The system converts the analog signal to a digital value that’s stored in flash memory. Circuit Cellar magazine, issue #198, Jan 2007, p. 12 [read article]

Ms. Krish's work was instrumental in Cornell's decision to install solar panels on the roof of Day Hall. [read more]

“Analog Devices Inc. Outstanding Student Designer Award”

Zhongtao Fu works on power aware RF circuit design in CMOS. As mobility and battery lifetime become every more important for wireless communications and power consumption of clock distribution networks threaten to overwhelm chip power budgets the ability to optimize trade-offs in performance and power becomes ever more important. Zhongtao's recent work explores ways to optimize noise performance in RF communication blocks while maintaining low power operation.

“Student Travel Award”

Alessandro Cerruti received a student travel award to present his paper entitled "Observed GPS and WAAS Signal-to-Noise Degradation Due to Solar Radio Bursts" at the ION GNSS 2006 Meeting, held in Fort Worth, TX in September, and also won the Best Presentation award for Section D3: Atmospheric Effects 1. A fourth-year Ph.D. student, Cerruti obtained his M.Eng. and BS degrees from ECE and is currently researching the effects of space weather on GPS signals under the direction of Professor Paul Kintner.

“DHS Fellowship”

Incoming ECE graduate student Matt Ezovski is the recipient of a 2006 U.S.Department of Homeland Security Fellowship. The program, established in 2003, is intended for students interested in pursuing basic science and technology innovations that can be applied to the DHS mission. As part of this program, Matt will spend the summer of 2007 at a DHS-affiliated facility.

Matt received the B.S. degree in electrical, computer, and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, in May 2006. He is entering the M.S./Ph.D. program in fall 2006 and plans to pursue a Ph.D. in the area of wireless communications and sensor networks in affiliation with the Adaptive Communications and Signal Processing Group. He also recently joined the IEEE-USA Committee on Communications and Information Policy.

“Student Paper Award”

2006 International Conference on Acoustic, Speech and Signal Provessing (ICASSP) held in Toulouse, France, for the paper "Minimax Quantization for Distributed Estimation," coauthored with Prof. L. Tong (Cornell) and Dr. A. Swami (Army Research Laboratory) won the contest in the area of Signal Processing Theory and Methods. ICASSP is the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications.

“Student Paper Award”

2006 International Conference on Acoustic, Speech and Signal Provessing (ICASSP) held in Toulouse, France, for the paper "A large deviation analysis of detection over multiaccess channels with random number of sensors," coauthored with Prof. L. Tong (Cornell) won the contest in the area of Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing. ICASSP is the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications.

“2004 Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award”

Awarded for the paper with S. Adireddy and L. Tong, "Sensor Networks with Mobile Access: Optimal Random Access and Coding," IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications: Speical Issue on Sensor Networks, vol.22, no. 6, pp 1058-1068, August 2004.

“2004 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award”

Awarded for the paper with L. Tong, "Optimal Design and Placement of Pilot Symbols for Channel Estimation" IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 50, no. 12, pp. 3055-3069, December, 2002.

“Student Paper Award”

2005 International Conference on Acoustic, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) for the paper with S. Ben-David and L. Tong, "Nonparametric Change Detection in 2D Random Sensor Fields",in Proc. ICASSP 2005, Philadelphia, PA, March, 2005.

“Student Paper Award”

2005 International Conference on Acoustic, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) for the paper with L. Tong, and H. V. Poor, "A Large Deviations Approach to Sensor Scheduling for Detection of Correlated Random Fields," in Proc. ICASSP 2005, Philadelphia, PA, March, 2005.

Best Student Paper Award, 2003 IEEE Radar Conference; L.R. Varshney and D. Thomas, "Sidelobe Reduction for Matched Filter Range Processing," in Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE Radar Conference, Huntsville, AL, 5-8 May 2003.

2002-03 IEEE Outstanding TA of the Year (for ECE 302)

2002-03 SiGe Design Challenge: ECE graduate students Daniel Kucharski, Drew Guckenberger and Jing-Hong Conan Zhan, led by Professor Kevin Kornegay, placed third in phase 2 of the SRC Design Contest for their project, "A 10Gb/s Integrated Optical Transceiver." This same student team also placed third in phase 1 of the competition last spring. Please see www.src.org for detailed information on this award.

2002-03 SiGe Design Challenge: ECE graduate students Daniel Kucharski, Drew Guckenberger and Jing-Hong Conan Zhan, led by Professor Kevin Kornegay, placed third in phase 2 of the SRC Design Contest for their project, "A 10Gb/s Integrated Optical Transceiver." This same student team also placed third in phase 1 of the competition last spring. Please see www.src.org for detailed information on this award.

2002-03 SiGe Design Challenge: ECE graduate students Daniel Kucharski, Drew Guckenberger and Jing-Hong Conan Zhan, led by Professor Kevin Kornegay, placed third in phase 2 of the SRC Design Contest for their project, "A 10Gb/s Integrated Optical Transceiver." This same student team also placed third in phase 1 of the competition last spring. Please see www.src.org for detailed information on this award.

IBM Fellowship

Lockheed Martin Award for Academic Excellence

IBM Ph.D. Fellowship for 2002/2003