Students win ECE Dissertation Fellowships

This year, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department has awarded five dissertation fellowships, and all have gone to ISR-related Ph.D. students. ECE awards the fellowships each year to outstanding students in the final stages of dissertation work.

Anup Menon is advised by Professor John Baras (ECE/ISR). His dissertation, “Learning in Multi-Agent Engineered Systems,” is focused on developing provably correct multi-agent learning algorithms and understanding the effects of the information exchange network on decentralized control systems.

Young Wook Kim is advised by ISR Director Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR). His dissertation is focused on developing an integrated microsystem for in vivo biofilm detection and treatment, and his research interests are in clinical diagnostic tool development, bacterial biofilms, wireless implantable microsystem, biosensors and biofilm treatments.

Haoyu Wang is advised by Assistant Professor Alireza Khaligh (ECE/ISR). His dissertation topic is “Ultra-Compact and Highly Efficient Wide Band Gap based Power Electronics Interfaces for Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles,” and his research interests are in analog and radio frequency integrated circuits design, power electronics interface design for human motion energy harvesting, gate driver and testing circuitries design for SiC power devices, as well as plug-in hybrid electrical vehicles.

Caleb Serafy is advised by Associate Professor Ankur Srivastava (ECE/ISR). The working title of Caleb's dissertation is "Electro-Thermal-Fluidic Co-design for Performance and Resilience in 3D Integrated Circuits." His research interests are in overcoming the design challenges associated with 3D-IC design, such as TSV cross coupling mitigation and TSV manufacturing and runtime fault tolerance; and in quantifying the performance and energy efficiency improvements made possible with 3D-IC architectures co-designed with different thermal infrastructure such as traditional air cooling versus micro-fluidic cooling.

Omur Ozel is advised by Professor Sennur Ulukus (ECE/ISR). Omur's dissertation is titled, "Coding and Scheduling in Energy Harvesting Communication Systems." His research interests are in wireless communications and information theory, information theory for energy harvesting communications and information-theoretic physical layer security.

Each student receives a $4,000 fellowship to recognize their outstanding work. Congratulations to all!

Published May 5, 2014