Awards

Gopinath, Afridi win 2016 CAREER Awards from NSF

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Apr 2016 18:52:59 +0000

Gopinath, Afridi win 2016 CAREER Awards from NSF Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/06/2016 - 12:52

Assistant professors Juliet Gopinath and Khurram Afridi have received 2016 CAREER Awards, the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for junior faculty.

"We anticipate with excitement that this new class of CAREER grantees will make pioneering discoveries and inspire young minds to advance the engineering enterprise and improve the lives of all Americans," NSF Assistant Director for Engineering Pramod Khargonekar said in a press release.

Gopinath will use her award to study the relationship between orbital angular momentum and rotating objects. “The results from the research will be far-reaching, with information about orbital angular momentum modal content essential for free-space communications and endoscopic super-resolution imaging (STED) for protein-level imaging in the human body,” she wrote in her proposal.

Afridi’s award will support his research in high-frequency power electronics for wireless power transfer systems. The technology “has the potential to address critical energy issues and improve human quality of life by enabling autonomous charging in applications ranging from electric vehicles (EVs) and robotics to portable electronics and biomedical implants,” Afridi wrote.

CAREER awards provide approximately $500,000 over five years.

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Zoya Popovic named 2015 Distinguished Research Lecturer

Anonymous — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 20:22:51 +0000

Zoya Popovic named 2015 Distinguished Research Lecturer Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/23/2015 - 14:22

Zoya Popovic of electrical, computer and energy engineering will deliver this year's Distinguished Research Lecture at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 16, in the Glenn Miller Ballroom. This lectureship is among the highest honors bestowed by the faculty upon a faculty member at CU-�鶹ӰԺ.

The title of Popovic's talk is "The Wireless World: 50 Cell Phones Sold Per Second!" She will attempt to answer the questions of where we are now in terms of wireless technology and its applications, how we got there, what are the current challenges, how engineers are solving them, and to speculate a bit on what the future holds.

The effects of wireless on the economy are impressive: In the first quarter of 2015 alone, the iPhone brought Apple over $50 billion, and this is just a part of wireless technology. In recent years, wireless communications accounts for 2% of energy usage in the world, which is equivalent to the aviation industry. At CU, research by Popovic and others solves challenges such as how to send more data while using less power, how radio waves can help in medicine, how to make smaller more functional radar and how to cook smartly.

Her lecture is free and open to the public, though pre-registration is recommended. To register, please visit www.tinyurl.com/ZoyaPopovic.

Each year, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research requests nominations from faculty for the Distinguished Research Lectureship, and a faculty review panel recommends one faculty member as a recipient. Three faculty members were selected this year, with Diane McKnight from civil, environmental and architectural engineering and Doug Seals from integrative physiology also delivering lectures.

Popovic is a Distinguished Professor and the Hudson Moore Jr. Endowed Chair of Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado. She obtained her Dipl.Ing. degree at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and her Ph.D. at Caltech. She has graduated more than 50 PhDs and currently advises 15 doctoral students in various areas of high-frequency electronics and microwave engineering. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the recipient of two IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques (MTT) Microwave Prizes for best journal papers, the White House National Science Foundation (NSF) Presidential Faculty Fellow award, the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) Issac Koga Gold Medal, the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE)/HP Terman Medal and the German Humboldt Research Award. She was named IEEE MTT Distinguished Educator in 2013. Her husband is a physicist, and together they have three daughters.

Zoya Popovic of electrical, computer and energy engineering will deliver this year's Distinguished Research Lecture at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 16, in the Glenn Miller Ballroom.

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Erickson named CU-�鶹ӰԺ Inventor of the Year

Anonymous — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 20:34:20 +0000

Erickson named CU-�鶹ӰԺ Inventor of the Year Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/23/2015 - 14:34

Professor Robert Erickson has been named CU-�鶹ӰԺ Inventor of the Year by the University of Colorado Technology Transfer Office. The award recognizes a researcher who "best represents both the spirit of innovation at CU-�鶹ӰԺ and best practices in commercialization of university technologies."

Erickson's work focuses on making use of new technologies to improve power management and energy utilization in a wide range of electronic systems including battery-powered mobile electronics, high-frequency switching power supplies and renewable-energy systems. His inventions continue to attract sustaining members to the Colorado Power Electronics Center (CoPEC), and one of his inventions, a low-profile micro inverter, has been engineered into a solar roof shingle.

Erickson holds eight patents, and took an entrepreneurial leave from the university in 2011 to serve as chief technology officer for Phobos Energy, a company he co-founded.

Currently, Erickson is serving as principal investigator on a two-year, $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a new composite power conversion approach for electric vehicles. He and professors Khurram Afridi, Dragan Maksimovic, Dan Seltzer and Ronggui Yang also received a grant to compete in the Google/IEEE Little Box Challenge. The contest's goal is to dramatically change the technology of solar power inverters, creating one that is at least 10 times smaller than the current picnic cooler-sized inverters commonly used in photovoltaic solar power systems and other green energy applications.

Professor's work focuses on making use of new technologies to improve power management and energy utilization in a wide range of electronic systems.

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Two faculty members named IEEE Fellows for 2015

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 07:00:00 +0000

Two faculty members named IEEE Fellows for 2015 Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/17/2014 - 00:00

Two faculty members from the CU-�鶹ӰԺ Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering were recently named Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for 2015.

Professor Dragan Maksimovic was selected for contributions to digital control of high-frequency switched-mode power converters. Professor Victor Bright of mechanical engineering, who holds a joint appointment in ECEE, was selected for his contributions to micro- and nano-electromechanical systems

According to the IEEE, the grade of fellow is the highest grade of membership, and the total number of members selected annually cannot exceed one-tenth of one percent of the organization's total voting membership. The grade is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and important career achievement.

Maksimovic and Bright join 10 other ECEE faculty members who are already IEEE Fellows: Frank Barnes, Steven Cundiff, Robert Erickson, Albin Gasiewski, Edward Kuester, Michael Lightner, Lucy Pao, Jay Pearlman, Zoya Popovic and Mahesh Varanasi. Five of the department's emeritus faculty members are also Fellows.

�鶹ӰԺ IEEE

The IEEE is the world's leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000 members in 160 countries, the IEEE is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. Dedicated to the advancement of technology, the IEEE publishes 30 percent of the world's literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 900 active industry standards. The association also sponsors or co-sponsors nearly 400 international technical conferences each year. To learn more about IEEE or the IEEE Fellow Program, please visit www.ieee.org.

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Moddel receives patent for new solar-cell technology

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Moddel receives patent for new solar-cell technology Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/15/2014 - 00:00

The idea for Garret Moddel's most recent patent - his 30th - has been in the works for nearly as many years.

Moddel, professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at CU-�鶹ӰԺ, was issued a patent in August for geometric diode, applications and method, a technology that lays the foundation for high-efficiency, low-cost photovoltaic cells.

"Before CU, I was at a Silicon Valley solar startup where we were making the usual semiconductor solar cells," Moddel said. "But I had this question in my head â€“ couldn't we make it out of something simpler?"

He came up with a few concepts at the time, but didn't pursue them until years later, when he jumped at the chance to develop his ideas further at CU-�鶹ӰԺ.

He explained that the problem with conventional solar cells is they can only convert about 35% of the light they collect into electrical power. Limitations on semiconductors mean that certain parts of the light spectrum, like infrared, aren't utilized, and other parts are wasted.

Antenna-coupled diode (rectenna) solar cells, which pick up light like a radio wave, help to solve that problem. But the diode that converts AC to DC still presents a challenge for maximizing the efficiency of the cell and making it cost-effective to manufacture.

"The diode has to operate at extremely high frequency - that's the hard part, and that's what my lab works on," Moddel said.

His geometric diode consists of a thin, arrowhead-shaped graphene film not much longer than an electron's mean-free path length, which allows charge carriers to move more easily to the left than to the right. The flat surface avoids a capacitance/resistance tradeoff that has prevented other diode implementations from being adopted.

The next step in Moddel's work will be to refine the materials and structure of the geometric diode. "We're now trying to make it practical to produce," he said.

Read More

http://ecee.colorado.edu/~moddel/QEL/Papers/Moddel11.pdf
Rectennas Solar Cells , Garret Moddel and Sachit Grover, editors, (Springer, New York, 2013)

Moddel was issued a patent in August for geometric diode, applications and method, a technology that lays the foundation for high-efficiency, low-cost photovoltaic cells.

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Grant will enable deep-brain imaging

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Sep 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Grant will enable deep-brain imaging Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/12/2014 - 00:00

In order to understand diseases like Parkinson's, researchers need to look at individual neurons in the brain. However, with current techniques, nearly 75 percent of the brain is inaccessible.

ECEE Assistant Professor Juliet Gopinath and her research team want to change that. They've received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a fiber-optic imaging instrument that will complete deep-brain imaging using a miniature nonlinear microscope. Specifically, the instrument will provide the ability look deep in the brain at the function of neurons in the olfactory system.

"Optical imaging methods offer an unprecedented ability to study individual neurons in the brain," Gopinath said.

Gopinath is collaborating with Victor Bright from CU-�鶹ӰԺ's Department of Mechanical Engineering, as well as Emily Gibson and Diego Restrepo from CU-Denver. Restrepo is the director of the Center for Neuroscience.

The project builds on the team's established work in four disciplines: lasers and nonlinear optics for the excitation source; nonlinear microscopy for high resolution imaging; electrically tunable electrowetting lenses for scanning; and optogenetics for optically reading out action potentials, or electrical signals that are released when neurons fire.

ECEE Assistant Professor Juliet Gopinath and her research team have received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a fiber-optic imaging instrument that will complete deep-brain imaging using a miniature nonlinear microscope.

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