News

Erika Susana Alcorta and Matthew Barondeau of Texas ECE have been named winners of 2023 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships for North America. The QIF program "is focused on recognizing, rewarding, and mentoring innovative PhD students across a broad range of technical research areas, based on Qualcomm’s core values of innovation, execution and teamwork. QIF enables graduate students to be mentored by our engineers and supports them in their quest towards achieving their research goals."

WNCG student Zhiwen Fan and his teammate Rishov Sarkar (Georgia Tech) were among the winners of this year's Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships for North America. The pair's winning project studied "Real-Time Visual Processing for Autonomous Driving via Video Transformer with Data-Model-Accelerator Tri-Design."

ECE students might have chatted with Prof. Brian Evans during his Friday coffee/advising hours, or in the new first-year graduate student mentoring program he coordinates, or in a student organization he advises. In weekly coffee hours, now running for 19 years, Prof. Evans has been providing a comfortable space for undergraduate and graduate students to talk about what’s on their mind and help each other. But his involvement extends further beyond the ECE department to the university community as a whole. And “whole” is what he strives to make our community.

The Applied Mechanics Division (AMD) of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has selected WNCG professor Nanshu Lu to receive the 2022 Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award. Shawn Chester, an associate professor of New Jersey Institute of Technology, was selected jointly with Lu to receive the award, which recognizes special achievements of young researchers in applied mechanics.  Read the full article via the Department of Aerospace Engineering

WNCG students Akash Doshi and Manan Gupta have been named winners in the 2021 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) North America Program. Doshi and Gupta proposed the project “Federated Generative Learning for Channel Estimation in mmWave and THz systems.” The pair was one of 16 winners chosen from 43 teams of finalists. “We are extremely honored to have been selected as the recipients of this prestigious fellowship,” Gupta said. “We look forward to working with Qualcomm to develop impactful and innovative wireless technology.”

A team of Texas ECE students has been named a winner of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2020 (North America) competition. The team of Khurram Mazher and Andrew Graff won for their project "Radar-to-radar Interference: System Level Analysis and Solutions." Khurram and Andrew were one of 13 winning teams selected from 42 finalists. The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship began in 2009, and "has continued to grow with the addition of more universities, more candidates, and expansion to our research centers internationally."

WNCG faculty member Todd Humphreys has received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Humphreys was one of five faculty members from The University of Texas at Austin to receive the award for 2019. The PECASE is the “highest honor bestowed by the United States Government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology.”

Today in Austin, pedestrians and cyclists account for more than 50% of all traffic deaths, even though they only make up about 20% of travelers on the roads. While the push towards automated vehicles could reduce these deaths, unless vehicles receive help from pedestrians, automated cars could become too cautious and risk avoidant to function efficiently.

WNCG student Ahmed Kord received a 2016 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for his project entitled, “Fully-Integrated Reconfigurable Magnet-less Non-reciprocal Components for Next-Generation Wireless Communication Systems.” The project was completed in collaboration with Negar Reiskarimian at Columbia University.

Prof. Evdokia Nikolova has been selected to receive a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The award is the most prestigious offered by NSF’s CAREER Program, providing up to five years of funding to junior faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of their organizations’ missions.