Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Faculty and Staff Awards

Aluru Wins 2009 P&S Outstanding New Professional Award

Assistant Research Professor Maneesha Aluru was awarded the 2009 P&S Outstanding New Professional Award for demonstrating innovative, creative, or original ways to accomplish job responsibilities; exhibiting service to Iowa State University, and more.

Ying Receives DTRA Young Investigator Award

Lei Ying

Assistant Professor Lei Ying won the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Young Investigator Award to conduct research on combating threats to networks. He is one of 15 people nationwide to receive this award.

Faculty Receive Patent for Switching Technology

Mani Mina and Robert J. Weber were awarded a U.S. patent (no. 7,555,177) for All Fiber Magneto-Optic On-Off Switch for Networking Applications.

Somani Awarded New U.S. Patent

Arun K. Somani

Department Chair Arun K. Somani received a U.S. patent (no. 7,536,477) for Access Mechanisms for Efficient Sharing in a Network.

Professors Appointed to New Professorships

Several professors were appointed to new roles:

  • Professor Venkataramana Ajjarapu was appointed to the David C. Nicholas Professorship of Electrical Engineering.
  • Assistant Professor Dionysios Aliprantis was appointed to the Litton Industries Professorship.
  • Assistant professors Jaeyoun Kim and Aditya Ramamoorthy received the Harpole-Pentair Developing Faculty Award, which provides supplemental support and enrichment opportunities to young assistant professors.

Assistant Professors Get Promoted

Brian Hornbuckle, Sang Kim, and Zhao Zhang were promoted from assistant professor to associate professor with tenure

Three Faculty and Staff Win Mervin S. Coover Distinguished Service Award

Three faculty and staff members were awarded the Mervin S. Coover Distinguished Service Award, including Manimaran Govindarasu, Assistant to the Chair Sara K. Harris, and Communications Specialist Dana McCullough. The annual award, named in honor of former Department Head Mervin S. Coover, is given to faculty and staff for their extra­ordinary service to the department.

Faculty Receive Warren B. Boast Undergraduate Teaching Award

Five faculty were recognized with the department’s 2009 Warren B. Boast Undergraduate Teaching Award—associate professors Degang Chen and Sang Kim, and assistant professors Tom Daniels, Alexander Stoytchev, and Joseph Zambreno. The annual award, named for former Department Head Warren B. Boast, recognizes outstanding faculty in the ECpE department.

Staff Member Receives P&S CYtation

Dana McCullough, communications specialist, received the university’s P&S CYtation, an award given semiannually by the Professional and Scientific (P&S) Council to recognize P&S staff at the university who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence.

Aliprantis Wins NSF CAREER Award

Dionysios Aliprantis

Assistant Professor Dionysios Aliprantis won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to research methods to decrease the weight and size of motors and generators, as well as improve their efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The award is given to teachers and scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within in the context of their organization’s mission. Read more about Aliprantis's research.

Stoytchev Receives Best Paper Award

Assistant Professor Alexander Stoytchev and computer science graduate student Matt Miller received the Best Paper Award at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning in August for their paper, “Hierarchical Voting Experts: An Unsupervised Algorithm for Hierarchical Sequence Segmentation.”

McCalley Presented with Regents Award for Faculty Excellence

James McCalley

Professor James McCalley received the Regents Award for Faculty Excellence. The award, presented by the Board of Regents, State of Iowa, recognizes faculty who are outstanding university citizens and who have rendered significant service to their institution and/or the state of Iowa.

Kamal Receives Best Paper Award

Professor Ahmed Kamal and his PhD student Osameh Al-Kofahi won the Best Paper Award at the Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks Symposium of IEEE's 2008 Global Communications Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Their paper was one of 11 papers chosen to receive this award from more than 1,000 papers presented at the conference. The paper is titled, "Scalable Redundancy for Sensors-to-sink Communication."

Vikram Dalal

Dalal Named IEEE Fellow

Vikram Dalal, the Thomas M. Whitney Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to thin-film solar photovoltaic energy conversion materials and devices. This honor recognizes outstanding IEEE members for their significant accomplishments in the advancement or application of engineering, science, or technology and for their contributions to the mission of IEEE.

Chu Earns Young Engineering Faculty Research Award

Chris Chu

Chris Chu, assistant professor, received the College of Engineering’s Young Engineering Faculty Research Award. The award recognizes an individual who has demonstrated the ability to conduct original research, contribute to scholarly literature, and introduce new and/or improved laboratory techniques and instrumentation. It also recognizes faculty whose research has had an impact outside the university.

Somani, Celik Win Best Paper Award

Koray Celik, ECpE graduate student; Soon-Jo Chung, assistant professor of aerospace engineering and electrical and computer engineering and director of the Aerospace Robotics Laboratory; and Arun K. Somani, ECpE department chair and Anson Marston Distinguished Professor, won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology in May 2008. The paper entitled, "Mono-Vision Corner SLAM for Indoor Navigation,"presents a real-time monocular vision-based range measurement method for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for an autonomous micro aerial vehicle with significantly constrained payload.  The proposed navigation strategy assumes a GPS-denied manmade environment, whose indoor architecture is represented via corner-based feature points obtained through a monocular camera.

Kothari and Company Earn Awards for Innovation

Suraj Kothari, professor, and his software company, EnSoft Corp., won the $25,000 top prize in the second annual statewide John Pappajohn Business Plan Competition. The prize was awarded during the Iowa Venture Capital and Entrepreneur Conference in Des Moines, Iowa. The Technology Association of Iowa also awarded the 2008 Prometheus Award for Innovation in Teaching to Kothari and Innovator of the Year to his company, EnSoft.