Rafael A. Rodríguez Solís

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).

Danijela Cabric

Research and Teaching Interests:

Wireless communications system design, machine learning for wireless communications, sensing and security, performance analysis and experiments on embedded platforms and software defined radios

Awards and Recognitions:
2020 Qualcomm Faculty Award
2018-2019 IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer
2012 NSF Career Award
2012 Hellman Fellow
2009 Okawa Foundation Award
2008 Samueli Fellow

Bert Hochwald

Bertrand Hochwald, Ph.D., serves as the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Electrical Engineering and Co-Director of the Wireless Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Hochwald has invented and co-invented technologies and published research articles that have become mainstays of communication theory and practice, including differential multiple-antenna methods, linear dispersion codes, channel estimation analysis, and multi-user vector precoding methods.

He is currently working on high-frequency radio circuits, sixth-generation cellular technologies, and methods to reduce human exposure to electromagnetic radiation from cell phones. Hochwald also oversees one of the Wireless Institutes flagship projects, the RadioHound spectrum sensing platform, currently on its third version. This multi-year project is unique in that the sensors have been designed and implemented predominantly by a team of graduate students, and have been deployed in trials run by the Federal Communications Commission and the US Postal Service.

He holds 47 U.S. patents in wireless communication and is the recipient of several achievement awards while employed at the Department of Defense and the Prize Teaching Fellowship at Yale University. He has more than 125 publications, several of which have been listed by Thomson ISI as most-cited over multiple years. Hochwald has also served as an editor for several Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) journals. He has received several paper awards, including the 2018 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society’s Harold A. Wheeler Applications Prize Paper with student Ding Nie. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors. Thomson Reuters has awarded Hochwald “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds,” multiple times for the significant global impact of his work.

Hochwald believes that wireless communications methods are, after their first 100 years, still in their infancy, and if everyone understood their smartphones a little better, they would all want to design their own.

Bobby Weikle

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.

Awards

  • IEEE Microwave Prize1993
  • David A. Harrison III Award, University of Virginia1999
  • All-University Teaching Award, University of Virginia 2001
  • Faculty Educational Innovation Award, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Virginia 2015
  • Edlich-Henderson Innovator of the Year Award, University of Virginia 2016

Research Interests

  • Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz Electronics
  • Wireless and Optical Communication Systems

Whitney Lohmeyer

Whitney Lohmeyer is currently serving as the Chief Technologist of the Space Bureau, Federal Communications Commission.

Lohmeyer is an Assistant Professor of Engineering at Olin College and a Research Affiliate at MIT in Aeronautics and Astronautics. She leads the Olin Satellite + Spectrum Technology & Policy (OSSTP) Group, and manages and contributes to the field of satellite communications systems. She also works closely with industry to advise on end-to-end system design, antenna systems, RF power amplification, radiation tolerance and spectrum strategy. Whitney is passionate about enabling affordable Internet access in order to generate economic growth and improve healthcare and education. Whitney was the first engineer hired at OneWeb, a company launching hundreds of low earth orbit communications satellites to provide global broadband and bridge the digital divide. While at OneWeb, she held a variety of roles both technical and policy-focused. As a Systems Engineer, she designed the RF Link Budget, and worked on the end-to-end communications system design, focusing on the LTE waveform and the user terminal antenna. In addition, she actively contributed to policy reform at the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and United Nations (UN) International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and represented OneWeb on the U.S. Delegation to the 2015 World Radio Conference, the culmination of a three-year regulatory review cycle. Prior to joining the OneWeb team, she worked as a hardware engineer at Google, and spent time in technical roles at Inmarsat and NASA. Whitney received her Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 2015, and her M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 2013, both funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. She earned her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from NC State University in 2011, as the only female in her class of approximately ninety students, and now currently serves on the board of North Carolina State University’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Department. She has been invited to speak at a variety of events including NC State’s 2018 MAE Commencement Ceremony, the UN Women’s Gender Equality and Mainstreaming (GEM) The Internet of Women: Challenge or Opportunity? and the UN’s and ITU’s Women’s Leadership Workshop on Empowering Women in Radiocommunications Negotiations.

INTERESTS

  • Satellite Communications
  • Wireless Communications
  • Satellite Systems
  • International Spectrum Policy
  • Principles of Wireless Communications

Thomas Marzetta

Thomas Marzetta is Distinguished Industry Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and Director of NYU WIRELESS. Born in Washington, D.C., he received the Ph.D. and SB in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1972, and the MS in Systems Engineering from University of Pennsylvania in 1973. Prior to joining NYU in 2017, he had three industrial research careers: petroleum exploration (Schlumberger-Doll Research, 1978 – 1987), defense (Nichols Research Corporation, 1987 – 1995), and telecommunications (Bell Labs, 1995 – 2017). At Bell Labs, he directed the Communications and Statistical Sciences Department within the former Mathematical Sciences Research Center, and he was elected a Bell Labs Fellow. He originated Massive MIMO, one of the cornerstones of fifth-generation wireless technology. He is lead author of the book Fundamentals of Massive MIMO.

Professor Marzetta was on the Advisory Board of MAMMOET (Massive MIMO for Efficient Transmission), an EU-sponsored FP7 project, and he was Coordinator of the GreenTouch Consortium’s Large Scale Antenna Systems Project. Recognition for his contributions to Massive MIMO include the 2017 IEEE Communications Society Industrial Innovation Award, the 2015 IEEE Stephen O. Rice Prize, and the 2015 IEEE W. R. G. Baker Award. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2003, and he received an Honorary Doctorate from Linköping University in 2015.

Research Interests: Massive MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output), Wireless technology

Education:

University of Pennsylvania, 1973
Master of Science, Systems Engineering

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1978
Doctor of Philosophy, Electrical Engineering

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1972
Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering

Thomas Hazlett

Thomas Hazlett holds the H.H. Macaulay Endowed Chair in Economics at Clemson, conducting research in the field of Law and Economics and specializing in the Information Economy, including the analysis of markets and regulation in telecommunications, media, and the Internet. Prof. Hazlett served as Chief Economist of the Federal Communications Commission, and has held faculty positions at the University of California, Davis, Columbia University, the Wharton School, and George Mason University School of Law. His research has appeared in such academic publications as the Journal of Law & Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics and the Rand Journal of Economics, and he has published articles in the Univ. of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Yale Journal on Regulation, the Columbia Law Review, and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. He also writes for popular periodicals including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Reason, The New Republic, The Economist, Slate, and the Financial Times, where he was a columnist on technology policy issues, 2002-2011. Prof. Hazlett also serves as Director of the Information Economy Project at Clemson University. He has provided expert testimony to federal and state courts, regulatory agencies, committees of Congress, foreign governments, and international organizations. His latest book, THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone, was published by Yale University Press in 2017.

Steven M. Bowers

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:

  • IEEE MTT-S Microwave Prize, 2015
  • IEEE International Microwave Symposium Best Student Paper Award, 2013
  • IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Conference Best Student Paper Award, 2012

Research Interests:

  • Internet of Things
  • Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz Electronics
  • Low Power Design

Cong Shen

Cong Shen received his B.S. and M.S. degrees, in 2002 and 2004 respectively, from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, China. He obtained the Ph.D. degree from the Electrical Engineering Department, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), in 2009. Prior to joining the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Virginia, Dr. Shen was a professor in the School of Information Science and Technology at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He also has extensive industry experience, having worked for Qualcomm Research, SpiderCloud Wireless, Silvus Technologies, and Xsense.ai, in various full time and consulting roles. His general research interests are in the area of communication theory, wireless communications, and machine learning.

He was the recipient of the “Excellent Paper Award” in the 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN 2017). Currently, he serves as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and editor for the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters.

Education: 

B.S. Tsinghua University, China, 2002

M.S. Tsinghua University, China, 2004

Ph.D. University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), 2009

Awards:

  • Excellent Paper Award, the 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN) 2017
  • IEEE Senior Member, since 2014

Research Interests:

  • Wireless communications and networking
  • Machine learning at the wireless edge
  • Multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning