News

Four Texas ECE faculty were recognized in Thomson Reuters’ list of Highly Cited Researchers in 2015 for exceptional impact in their fields. They are Prof. Jeffrey Andrews, Prof. Al Bovik, Prof. Robert Heath, and Prof. Sriram Vishwanath. This is the second consecutive year on the list for all four researchers.

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.

Six professors and one adjunct associate professor from the Cockrell School of Engineering have been included in the Thomson Reuters list of Highly Cited Researchers for 2014. This list recognizes many of the world’s leading scientific minds, and the strong Cockrell School representation illustrates UT Austin’s growing influence on the global research landscape. Four of these professors come from the Deprtment of Electrical and Computer Engineering (UT ECE) and the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG).

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.