DDear friends and colleagues,DearDear friends and colleagues,

Fall quarter is underway with a noticeable uptick in activity around campus. Though summers are a quieter time at universities, there was still significant activity within ECE. Several faculty members organized a two-day career development workshop for undergraduate and first-year graduate students in computer engineering. Many of our faculty also have undergraduate students work as summer researchers in their labs (along with graduate students and postdocs) – we profile the work of a few of them in this newsletter. Some of our undergraduates also did research at Argonne National Lab through the NAISE summer program, which we profile. In addition, a new NSF TRIPODS center on advancing the theoretical foundation of data science was launched, which involves several ECE faculty.

In this newsletter, we also feature some of the exciting research ECE faculty and students are involved in. This includes work on optimizing the power grid in the face of a growing number of renewable resources and work on understanding how 2D materials respond to disorder, which could lead to faster transistors. I am continually inspired by the breadth and depth of research in ECE.  

We also share the awards and honors obtained by our faculty and students, which includes one of our faculty being selected to speak at a TEDx Chicago event and two others becoming IEEE Life fellows.

I hope you enjoy reading these stories. I look forward to hearing from you.  

Warmest regards,

Professors Aggelos Katsaggelos and Thrasos Pappas were elevated to Life Fellow members by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a lifetime distinction recognizing significant contributions to one’s field of study.

Professor Prem Kumar co-chaired the NASA Quantum Sensing Workshop in September.

Northwestern IT inducted Professor Ilya Mikhelson to the inaugural Canvas Hall of Fame, a student-nominated award created to honor instructors who went above and beyond to create engaging learning experiences using the Canvas Learning Management System during the 2021-22 academic year.

Professor Manijeh Razeghi shared insights about semiconductor science and quantum materials at TEDxChicago 2022 in September.

PhD student Ibrahim Tanriover (advised by Professor Koray Aydin) received Northwestern’s Ryan Fellowship.

PhD student Zhilu Wang and Professor Qi Zhu won a Best Paper Award in the Embedded Systems Design track at the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Design, Automation, and Test in Europe Conference 2022, held in March.

The department recognized nine students and faculty during its annual department awards ceremony in May.