News

WNCG student Ian Roberts has been awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. The NSF program identifies researchers “anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering.”

Every Spring, Texas ECE’s Awards Banquet celebrates the achievements of the department’s outstanding students and faculty. Three WNCG members were among those honored at this year’s event, which was held last week on May 6. WNCG Student Ahmed Kord won the prestigious Graduate Student Excellence Award for 2018-2019. The department confers this prize annually on one graduate student who has demonstrated “high academic achievement in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.”

WNCG faculty member Haris Vikalo has been promoted to full professor. Vikalo’s was one of five promotions celebrated by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) this week; Profs. Deji Akinwande and Ali Yilmaz were also promoted to Professor, while Prof. Mohit Tiwari made tenure as an Associate Professor, and Prof. Mark McDermott was promoted to Professor of Practice.

Former WNCG Postdoctoral Researcher, Dr. Yakir Hadad, recently joined the faculty in the School of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Physical Electronics at Tel-Aviv University in Israel. His role as a tenure track Senior Lecturer is the equivalent of a tenure track Assistant Professor in the United States’ academic system.

UT ECE alumna Yang Zhao has received a 2014 Outstanding Dissertation Award from The University of Texas at Austin graduate school. The Outstanding Dissertation Award was established in 1979 by the Graduate School to recognize exceptional work by doctoral students and to encourage the highest levels of scholarship, research, and writing.  Yang Zhao received her PhD from UT ECE in 2013 .under Prof. Andrea Alù.