News

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.”

Prof. Jeff Andrews and Prof. Robert Heath of Texas ECE have been named co-recipients of the 2019 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award for their contributions to wireless communication systems. The IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award is an IEEE Technical Field Award, meaning it spans all subfields of electrical engineering. It was established in 2001 to recognize "outstanding contributions to technologies holding the promise of innovative applications." The award is sponsored by Dr. Kiyo Tomiyasu, the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, and the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society.

WNCG faculty member Constantine Caramanis was one of five associate professors in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) promoted to full professor this spring. Caramanis joined UT ECE and WNCG in the fall of 2006; he is currently the WNCG’s assistant director. His research interests include: Decision-making under uncertainty, Statistical learning and data driven decision-making, Large scale networks and computation, and Adaptive Control and Optimization.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) recently awarded four UT Austin faculty $1 million for a study regarding effects and reparation efforts following WMD attacks on interdependent networks.