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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Andrea Alù, an associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, the prestigious 2015 Waterman Award, which comes with $1 million of research funding. Alù is the first recipient from a Texas university. An associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a former recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, Alù is renowned for groundbreaking discoveries and technological innovations in the defense and communications sectors.

Researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have achieved a milestone in modern wireless and cellular telecommunications, creating a radically smaller, more efficient radio wave circulator that could be used in cellphones and other wireless devices, as reported in the latest issue of Nature Physics. The new circulator has the potential to double the useful bandwidth in wireless communications by enabling full-duplex functionality, meaning devices can transmit and receive signals on the same frequency band at the same time.

A team of researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Unversity of Texas at Austin (UT ECE) led by Prof. Andrea Alù has built the first-ever circulator for sound. The team’s experiments successfully prove that the fundamental symmetry with which acoustic waves travel through air between two points in space (“if you can hear, you can also be heard”) can be broken by a compact and simple device.