Members of the Center for Advanced Radio Sciences and Engineering (CARSE) at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez (UPRM), and SpectrumX, the U.S. National Science Foundation Spectrum Innovation Center, traveled to Italy this week to present their research.
In early January, radio science researchers from across the United States and beyond came together for the National Radio Science Meeting (NRSM) at the University of Colorado Boulder. The meeting was attended by six SpectrumX members, who hosted workshops and participated in multiple panel discussions. The NRSM is sponsored by the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Radio Science.
A native of Southern California, Jonas Zmuidzinas received his B.S. in physics from Caltech in 1981 and his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley in 1987. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois in 1988-89 and then joined the Caltech faculty as an Assistant Professor of physics in 1990. He became Associate Professor in 1995, Professor in 2000, Merle Kingsley Professor in 2010, and Director of the Caltech Optical Observatories in 2018. Concurrently, he has held positions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and has collaborated closely with JPL scientists and technologists, including serving as a JPL Senior Research Scientist (2006-11), Director of the JPL Microdevices Laboratory (2007-2011), and JPL Chief Technologist (2011-16).
His research interests center on astrophysics at millimeter through far-infrared wavelengths, including the development of the technology needed to fully exploit this portion of the spectrum. He has constructed instrumentation for ground-based, airborne, and space telescopes, including invention and development of several types of superconducting detectors and devices as recognized by NASA’s Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal in 2013. He has served as a reviewer and advisor for NASA, NSF, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Sandia National Laboratories, other U.S. government agencies and international science agencies, and is author or co-author of over 250 scientific articles.
Rafael Rodriguez Solis is currently a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez.
His main interests are wideband and tunable microwave and millimeter-wave antennas and circuits, in particular for communication, radar, and body area network systems. He is the UPRM PI for the NOAA Cooperative Remote Sensing Science and Technology Center (NOAA-CREST), the director of the UPRM Microwave and Millimeter-wave Systems Laboratory and the Institute of Research in Integrative Systems and Engineering (IRISE), and the coordinator for the UPRM Applied Electromagnetics Laboratory.
At this time, Rafael is working on the development of antennas for body-centric wireless communications, in the development of weather nowcast services for renewable energy applications, and in the development of compact microwave sensors for small UAVs. He is a senior member of the IEEE (Antennas and Propagation Society, Microwave Theory and Techniques Society, and Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society).
Robert M. Weikle, II received his B.S. in electrical engineering and physics from Rice University in 1986, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1987 and 1992, respectively. At Caltech, he developed a variety of new techniques for realizing and modeling arrays of coupled nonlinear active devices for microwave/millimeter-wave power combining. For this work, he shared the 1993 IEEE Microwave Prize. During 1992, Dr. Weikle was a postdoctoral research associate with the Department of Applied Electron Physics at Chalmers Tekniska Hogskola in Goteborg, Sweden where he
worked on millimeter-wave amplifiers based on high electron mobility transistors and low-noise terahertz mixers using superconducting hot electron bolometers.
In January 1993, Dr. Weikle joined the faculty of the University of Virginia where he is currently Professor in the Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. During this time, he has built a laboratory for millimeter and submillimeter-wave device characterization, circuit design, prototyping, and metrology and has pursued research on millimeter-wave and submillimeter-wave electronics, devices, and systems. Among his groups’ research efforts are design and fabrication techniques for submillimeter-wave integrated circuits, heterogenous integraton of III-V semiconductor devices with micromachined silicon, investigation of measurement instrumentation and calibration techniques for terahertz device and circuit characterization (including micromachined probes for submillimeter-wave on-wafer measurements), and research on planar antennas and quasi-optical components for millimeter-wave imaging and power-combining.
In 2011, Dr. Weikle co-founded Dominion Microprobes, Inc., with colleagues Scott Barker and Arthur Lichtenberger, to develop on-wafer probe technologies for terahertz measurements. He currently serves at its Chief Technology Officer.
Steven M. Bowers received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA, in 2007, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in millimeter- wave circuits and systems from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, in 2009 and 2014, respectively. In August 2014, he joined the faculty of the Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research interests include holistic integration of high-frequency analog circuits, advanced digital circuits, novel electromag- netic structures and integrated silicon photonics to enable the next generation of millimeter-wave applications, specifically in adaptive and self-healing millimeter-wave circuits and millimeter-wave power generation, radiation, and detection.
Dr. Bowers is a member of IEEE HKN and TBP. He was the recipient of the California Institute of Technology’s Institute Fellowship (2007), the Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer Award (2009), the IEEE RFIC Symposium Best Student Paper Award (2012), the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (IEEE MTT-S) International Microwave Symposium (IMS) Best Student Paper Award (2013), and the 2015 IEEE MTT-S Microwave Prize.
Education:
B.S. University of California, San Diego, 2007
M.S. California Institute of Technology, 2009
Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, 2014
Post-Doc California Institute of Technology, 2013-2014
Awards:
Research Interests:
Gerhard received his BS in Physics from the US Naval Academy in 1992 and his Ph D. in Physics from the University of Virginia in 2003. After graduating from the Naval Academy, Gerhard served on active duty in the US Navy for 5 years. After graduate school, he worked as a Senior Process Engineer at Intel PTD in 2003 and 2004. For the past 16 years, he has served in many roles at Virginia Diodes, Inc. the world’s leading mmWave and THz test and measurement and components company. He is currently the Chief Operations Officer.
Dr. Arthur Lichtenberger is a Research Professor at the University of Virginia in Electrical and Computer Engineering and the NRAO Director of the UVA Microfabrication Laboratories (UVML). He received a BA from Amherst College in 1980 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UVA in 1985 and 1987 respectively. He has built an internationally recognized research program in superconducting materials, devices, circuits and packaging for ultra-sensitive single pixel and array THz detectors, having collaborated with astronomical groups for the past 25 years to develop state of the art millimeter and submm wavelength mixers for use on radio telescopes throughout the world. His group’s research, in collaboration with professors Barker and Weikle, also includes the investigation of materials and microfabrication technologies for new terahertz devices, circuits and metrology. To date, he has been PI or Co-PI on over 25 million dollars of funding and an author on over 150 papers. He is a founding member, and the president and COO of Dominion MicroProbes Inc. He obtained $9.05M from internal UVA funds for the renovation of the UVML cleanroom in 2017, and was the PI on a 2017 UVA Strategic Investment Fund award (Multifunctional Materials Integration Facility Launch) for $10M.
B.S. Physics, Amherst College, 1980
M.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Virginia, 1985
Ph.D. Electrical Engineering, University of Virginia, 1987
Jeffrey L Hesler is the Chief Technology Officer of Virginia Diodes and has a visiting position at the University of Virginia. For more than 25 years he has been working on creating new technologies that utilize the Terahertz (THz) frequency band for scientific, defense, and industrial applications. He has published over 200 technical papers in journals and international conferences proceedings, is a member of IEEE Technical Committee MTT-21 (THz Technology and Applications) and is a co-Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology. Terahertz systems based on his innovative designs are now used in hundreds of research laboratories throughout the world.
Prof. Popovic advises on research in areas of high-efficiency linear and broadband microwave power amplifiers, low-loss broadband microwave and millimeter-wave circuits and antennae, millimeter-wave and THz quasi-optical techniques, active antenna arrays, wireless powering for low-power sensors and high-power wireless near-field charging, microwave applications in medicine such as high-field MRI and core body temperature measurements, microwave heating for waste management and Rydberg atom microwave and millimeter-wave quantum sensors.
Distinguished Professor • Lockheed Martin Endowed Chair in RF Engineering
ELECTROMAGNETICS, RF & MICROWAVES
