Announcing the 2021 ECE Undergraduate Awards

The William S. Einwechter Award The William S. Einwechter Award is presented annually to one or more members of the ECE senior class who have demonstrated distinguished records of service to ECE and its students, to the College and to the University. This year’s Einwechter Award winner is Parker Miller . Miller’s work in ECE focused on analog and RF circuit design. Most recently, he completed a tunable wireless receiver for his M.Eng. project with Professor Al Molnar. Miller served on the executive board of the Maker Club and helped build up the new mechanical lab space in Phillips 201. “In... Read more

Environmental Concerns Arise Over Energy Needed To Mine Bitcoin

Eilyan Bitar, ECE associate professor and David Croll Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, weighs in on how a Bitcoin mining operation is drawing criticism from people who say the natural gas burned to make the cryptocurrency is causing too much pollution. According to Bitar, "Inevitably, that would drive an increase in the supply of generation or electricity from more dispatchable generators, like natural gas, which produces greenhouse gas emissions." Listen to the full NPR episode . Read more

Kunal Shastri

Kunal Shastri receives ECE Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award

Kunal Shastri, Ph.D. student in the Monticone Lab, is the winner of the 2021 Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Shastri joined Assistant Professor Francesco Monticone’s research group in August 2017 as a Ph.D. student and graduate research assistant. He worked as a TA for several undergraduate courses in the intervening years including ECE 2100 (Fall 2018), ECE 4320 (Spring 2021) and most recently for ECE 3030, “Electromagnetic Fields and Waves,” in the Fall 2019 and Fall 2020 semesters, when Monticone was the instructor of the course... Read more

Prepare the grid now for electric vehicles

Eilyan Bitar , ECE associate professor and David Croll Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, has published an op-ed in the Albany Times Union arguing that "the transition to an all-electric car future won't be possible without careful planning and coordination with the power grid and the companies that manage its operation." In response to Volvo and GM's recent announcements to completely phase out all gasoline-powered cars by 2030 and 2035 respectively, he describes some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities that the increased adoption of electric vehicles will present to the power... Read more

Kirstin Petersen

Petersen Receives NSF CAREER Award

Kirstin Petersen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received a U.S. National Science Foundation Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) Award from the Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS). The award supports her research proposal “Environmentally-Mediated Coordination in Natural and Robot Swarms” for a five-year period from 2021 through 2026 with a total amount of $520,490. “Our project looks beyond robots working in parallel and towards actual swarm intelligence leveraging both explicit and implicit computation through software, morphology and embodiment into... Read more

depiction of energy band gap

Ultrawide bandgap gives material high-power potential

By: David Nutt

A Cornell collaboration has found a way to grow a single crystalline layer of alpha-aluminum gallium oxide that has the widest energy bandgap to date – a discovery that clears the way for new semiconductors that will handle higher voltages, higher power densities and higher frequencies than previously seen. The collaboration was led by co-senior authors Debdeep Jena and Huili Grace Xing , both professors in electrical and computer engineering and in materials science and engineering. The team also included David Muller , the Samuel B. Eckert Professor in Applied and Engineering Physics, who... Read more

Thomas Tapen receives 2021 ECE Outstanding Thesis Research Award

Congratulations to ECE Ph.D. candidate Thomas Tapen, winner of this year's ECE Outstanding Thesis Research Award. The annual award is given to a graduating Ph.D. student from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering based on the significance of their doctoral research. The working title of Tapen's thesis is: "Design and Analysis of Multi-Octave Tunable RF/MMW Front-Ends for High Out-of-Band Linearity Software Defined Radio." His research is focused on multi-octave passive mixer-based duplexing transceivers, and more recently similarly widely tunable LC equivalent resonators, both for... Read more