Features
Message from the Head of the Department 3
Dr. Shengli Zhou is the First Recipient
of the Newly Endowed Associate
Professorship4
Bar-Shalom is the Top-Ranked Academic
in Aeronautical and Space Engineering
4
ECE Welcomes New Faculty and Staff
4
G. Clifford Carter Receives the 2012 IEEE
Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal
5
Michael Georgiopoulos is
Appointed Interim Dean at UCF
5
This newsletter is published for the alumni, faculty, students,
corporate supporters and friends of the Department of Electrical &
Computer Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Suggestions
and information are always welcome.
Alumnus Ralph Bernstein Talks About
“Rediscovering” Mona Lisa
5
Please send correspondence and address corrections to the address
below or email rajeev@engr.uconn.edu.
Dr. Gokirmak Receives CAREER Award
6
Nanoelectronics Lab: Building Community
7
CHASE Center Launched
7
Senior Design Day 2012
8
ECE Faculty Profiles
9
Affiliated Faculty
9
Emeritus Faculty
9
Industrial Advisory Board
11
Daniel E. Noble
12
Rajeev Bansal
University of Connecticut
Department of Electrical &
Computer Engineering
371 Fairfield Way, Unit 4157
Storrs, CT 06269-4157
The creative efforts of the School
of Engineering staff members
Nan Cooper, Chris LaRosa and
student Deepti Boddapati (CLAS ’14)
are gratefully acknowledged.
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electrical & computer engineering
Message from the Head of the Department
I
am pleased to share with you the Winter 2013 edition of our
Newsletter. The ECE department continues to thrive. Here are
some faculty achievements from the last year:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Dr. Shengli Zhou was selected as the first recipient of the newly endowed Charles H. Knapp Associate Professorship in Electrical Engineering (page 4).
Drs. Ali Bazzi and Omer Khan, profiled on page 4, joined the
ECE faculty as tenure-track assistant professors.
Dr. Yaakov Bar-Shalom, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Marianne E Klewin Professor, received the 2012 Connecticut Medal of Technology.
Professor Faquir Jain was elected a Fellow of SPIE.
Professor Quing Zhu received the Alumni Association Faculty Excellence in Research and Creativity (Sciences) Award.
Dr. Bahram Javidi, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, received the 2012 AAUP (UConn-chapter) Research Excellence Award.
Dr. Mohammad Tehranipoor was named a Castleman Term Associate Professor in Engineering Innovation.
As always, I appreciate the continuing support of our alumni and
industrial partners. If you have any comments or suggestions, please send
me a note at Rajeev@engr.uconn.edu. Also, please check our website
(www.ee.uconn.edu/index.php) for the latest news about our programs.
Rajeev Bansal
Professor and Head
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Department by the Numbers
UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION
The Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) department offers undergraduate
degrees in Electrical Engineering (EE), Computer Engineering (CompE, offered
jointly with the Computer Science & Engineering Department), and Engineering Physics (jointly with the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences). During the
academic year 2011-2012, we awarded 28 B.S.E. degrees in EE, five degrees in
CompE, and one in Engineering Physics.
RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
The ECE faculty conducts funded research in fields including systems and
energy, communications and signal/image processing, biomedical engineering,
microelectronics, photonics and optoelectronics, electromagnetics, nanotechnology, VLSI, computer engineering, and homeland security. Scholarly productivity
stimulated by research is strong. The faculty worked on 130 sponsored grants
valued at $5.7 million for FY 12 ($4.2 million in direct expenditures). During
the year, the ECE faculty advised 134 graduate students; of these, 17 successfully completed their Ph.D. degrees and 30 students garnered their M.S. degrees
(including those in Clinical Engineering). Mohammad Tehranipoor was awarded
two patents; Geoffrey Taylor and Peng Zhang each received one.
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3
Dr. Shengli Zhou
is the First Recipient
of the Newly Endowed
Associate Professorship
U
Conn Emeritus Professor Charles
H. Knapp (BSEE’53, PhD ’62) grew
up in next-door Coventry, Conn., attended
a one-room schoolhouse as a child, and,
later in life, before he owned his own car,
would hitchhike his way to Storrs for classes.
After time in the US Air Force and working for corporations like RCA and IBM,
he returned to Storrs to become an icon at
the School of Engineering in the rapidly
changing world of electrical and computer
engineering.
Thanks to a $363,000 donation from
Professor Knapp’s children, Robert, Linda
Bar-Shalom is
the Top-Ranked
Academic in
Aeronautical
and Space
Engineering
Dr. Yaakov Bar-Shalom,
Board of Trustees
Distinguished Professor
and the Marianne E.
Klewin Endowed Professor in Engineering, is the top-ranked
academic in the Aeronautical and Space
Engineering field as judged by a complex
formula that measures number of scholarly journal publications and number
of citations/journal paper, according to
academic.research.microsoft.com, one of
several academic ranking organizations.
Of Dr. Bar-Shalom’s estimated 364 scholarly papers, 42 have 42 or more citations,
which leads to an overall h index of 42.
Alumnus Dr. Thiagalingam Kirubarajan
(M.S., Ph.D, Electrical Engineering, ’95,
’98), a professor at McMaster University
(Ontario, Canada) is ranked number five
based on the same criteria.
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(DelGizzi), Barry and Jennifer (Loomer),
the university recently created the Charles
H. Knapp Associaate Professorship in
Electrical Engineering. On the evening of
November 2, 2012, faculty, alumni, and
friends of the family gathered at the UConn
Alumni House to celebrate Prof. Knapp’s
professional contributions and to name
Dr. Shengli Zhou as the first recipient of
the newly endowed Associate Professorship.
Dr. Zhou, a 2007 recipient of the
Presidential Early Career Awards for
Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award,
has published extensively in the areas of
Photo by The Defining Photo
wireless communications and signal processing. He has published one book, 82 journal
papers, and currently holds 10 patents.
His work has been cited more than 6000
times. His research in underwater acoustic
communications at UConn has attracted
three million dollars in extramural funding.
With two other faculty members at
UCONN, he has co-founded Aquatic
Sensor Network Technologies (AquaSeNT),
a startup company focused on advancing
the state of the art of underwater acoustic
communications and networking.
ECE Welcomes New Faculty and Staff
The Electrical & Computer Engineering Department welcomed one staff member
(Celine Goorahoo) and two new assistant professors (Ali Bazzi and Omer Khan) in Fall 2012
Dr. Bazzi, who received his
Ph.D. from the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in December 2010,
brings expertise in the power
engineering area. He has gained industrial
experience working at Delphi Electronics & Safety for the past year. His research
interests include power electronics design,
control, optimization, and reliability modeling in motor drives and solar photovoltaic
applications. Dr. Bazzi is also interested in
renewable energy integration in micro-grids,
and real-time control and optimization of
energy systems in general. His teaching
interests include power electronics, electrical
machines, and motor drives.
Dr. Khan joins the ECE
Department in the area of
computer engineering. He
received his Ph.D. from the
University of Massachusetts,
Amherst in 2009 and was most recently a
Research Affiliate in the Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT). His teaching and
research expertise spans the general fields
of computer architecture, digital system
design, and VLSI, with particular interest in
scalability of on-chip memory, networks and
communication in future multicore architectures; hardware/software co-design; VLSI
and digital systems design; and simulation
and construction of architecture prototypes.
Celine Goorahoo joined the
department as an administrative services specialist to help
provide post-award services
for the growing portfolio of
research grants and contracts. A native of
Guyana (S. America), she comes to UConn
after 23 years of experience as a leader of a
bookkeeping team at Dun & Bradstreet
(in its multiple incarnations).
Alumni in the News
G. Clifford Carter Receives
the 2012 IEEE Jack S. Kilby
Signal Processing Medal
Alumnus
Ralph Bernstein
Talks About
“Rediscovering”
Mona Lisa
D
A
r. Clifford Carter (MS ’72, PhD ’76) received the 2012 IEEE
Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal for his contributions to
“the fundamentals of coherence and time-delay estimation and to
underwater acoustics signal processing.” The award, established in
1995 and sponsored by Texas Instruments Inc., consists of a gold
medal, a bronze replica, a certificate, and an honorarium.
Following graduation from the Coast Guard Academy, G.
Clifford Carter served as a communications and sonar training
officer, where he learned challenges of real-world electronics. Later,
he went to work for the Navy and attended graduate school at the
University of Connecticut, where he studied under Professor Charles H. Knapp
(see page 4) and earned his MS degree and PhD degrees in electrical engineering.
G. Clifford Carter’s pioneering contributions to determining and using coherence
and time-delay estimation have had lasting impact on the field of signal processing including sonar detection, classification, and localization. Dr. Carter’s algorithms are used
today in applications ranging from underwater acoustics for the U.S. Navy’s submarine
fleet to healthcare. His research led to eleven patents and three co-authored engineering
handbooks. An IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. Carter retired from the Naval Undersea Warfare
Center Division Newport, Newport, R.I., in 2009 as a senior technologist for acoustic
signal processing.
lumnus Ralph Bernstein (BSEE 1956)
returned to UConn half a century later
to present his multifaceted research in digital
imaging at the 2012 Alumni Weekend in
Storrs. In 1986, he participated in the team
that digitally rediscovered Leonardo da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Using a combination
of infrared scanning, computerized digital
enhancement and spatial filtering, they were
able to “peel back the layers” to show the
original hues of the masterpiece. Additionally, they discovered there may have been
a pearl necklace that da Vinci later painted
out, and the eyes and mouth may have been
restored throughout the centuries.
Michael Georgiopoulos is
Appointed Interim Dean at UCF
D
r. Michael Georgiopoulos (PhD ’86) has been on the faculty of the Department
of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central
Florida (UCF) since 1986. In 2010, he was named a Pegasus Professor, the most prestigious faculty award at UCF, for his “extraordinary contributions” in teaching, research
and service. On Jul 1, 2012, he was appointed the Interim Dean of the College of
Engineering and Computer Science (CECS). CECS is one of the nation’s largest colleges
of engineering and computer science with approximately 8,000 students enrolled.
Harris Engineering Center
by FLJuJitsu
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Faculty News
Dr. Gokirmak Receives CAREER Award
D
r. Ali Gokirmak, assistant professor of
Electrical & Computer Engineering,
is a 2012 recipient of a coveted National
Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. Dr. Gokirmak’s
five-year, $400,000 research project involves
phase change materials and electro-thermal
effects at the nanoscale. It is the 27th
CAREER Award received by current
UConn engineering faculty and the 15th
awarded since 2007 alone.
Dr. Gokirmak’s CAREER research will
focus on the integration of phase change
memory (PCM) with silicon electronics
and the fundamental scientific challenges
regarding electrical, thermal and thermoelectric processes that take place in a
nanometer scale geometry. To replicate the
common binary data storage format, in
PCMs, an electric current is passed through
a phase-change material (most often an
alloy containing germanium, antimony and
tellurium) to produce two states: crystalline
and orderly with low electrical resistance,
and the disordered amorphous state characterized as having high electrical resistance.
While many applications require just two
states for memory storage, PCM is capable
of being manipulated to achieve multi-level
storage that may allow for more dense data
storage with less energy usage.
This research effort will integrate
fabrication and electrical measurements
with computational studies, in collaboration
with the IBM Watson Research Center.
The research partners at IBM will play a
vital role in discussions related to current
state of the art in the industry and direction
Left to right: Faruk Dirisaglik, Gokhan Bakan, Adam Cywar, Dr. Ali Gorkimak,
Azer Faraclas, Nicholas Williams, and Sean Fischer.
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electrical & computer engineering
of the fundamental scientific studies needed
for PCM to become a mainstream memory
technology. The devices will be fabricated
by UConn students at the IBM Watson
Research Center, while experiments and
computational studies will be carried out
at UConn.
Dr. Gokirmak and Dr. Helena Silva
co-direct the Nanoelectronics Laboratory
at UConn in Electrical & Computer
Engineering. Drs. Gokirmak and Silva
previously received a $512,000 grant from
the U.S. Department of Energy in support
of research on current-induced crystallization of silicon and thermoelectric transport
in silicon nanostructures. The Nanoelectronics Laboratory has received approximately $1.7M in federal research grants
since 2007.
center News
Nanoelectronics Lab:
Building Community
D
uring summer 2012, the Nanoelectronics Lab, headed by Drs. Ali
Gokirmak and Helena Silva, hosted two
middle school teachers, Doug and Annie
Perkins, and seven high school students
who were participants in UConn’s Mentor
Connection summer program. The two
ECE faculty members and their graduate
students involved the visitors in a variety
of “fun” projects involving electronics
that expanded the reach of the UConn
engineering community.
The first project that they worked on
was the ‘optical audio link.’ In this project
they engineered transmitter and receiver
circuits to transmit music through lasers.
“It was a very intensive
program. It required a full
week of lecturing to get
them up to speed on these
concepts,” said Dr. Gokirmak. UConn students
did the teaching. Sean
Fischer, currently a senior
in Electrical Engineering (EE), did most of the
build these devices,” said Annie Perkins.
The robotics clubs headed by both
Perkinses will also benefit from their
summer lab experience. “We were trying
to learn more about electronics so we
could better troubleshoot our robotics
components,” explained Annie Perkins.
Their experience will also help with
expanding the classroom science modules
dealing with electronics and robotics that
are taught to all students.
Sean Fischer said that opening the
lab to non-engineers proved to be more
enlightening and educational than the
usual summer research experience. “It’s
different being on the other side of the
CHASE Center
Launched
I
n June 2012, the Center for Hardware
assurance, Security, and Engineering
(CHASE) was founded at UConn under the
leadership of Professor Mohammad Tehranipoor. The Center’s mission is to provide the
University with a physical and intellectual
environment necessary for interdisciplinary
hardware-oriented research and applications to meet the challenges of the future
in the field of assurance and security, with
particular emphasis on modern integrated
circuits and systems. Senator Joe Lieberman
heralded UConn’s contributions to cyber
security research during a February 2012
visit. In 2010, the University of Connecticut
was named a National Center of Excellence
in Information Assurance Research (CAER). Additional information about CHASE is
available at www.chase.uconn.edu.
“With the grants that the NSF gives
us, we try to do something with a
broader impact.”
instruction. Jonathan Rarey, an EE junior,
showed them how to make their circuit
boards and also drilled the boards for
them. “We could have ordered the components but we thought it would be more
fun for them to see how it was built,” said
Dr. Gokirmak. “By the end they built their
own circuit boards and took them home to
show their friends and family.”
Doug and Annie Perkins, seasoned
UConn engineering “lab rats” who had
participated in the Joule Fellows and da
Vinci Project previously, worked with the
lab team to increase their knowledge about
electronics so they could provide better instruction to their middle school students.
“Doug runs an enrichment program, so he
has small group of kids who can actually
lecture hall,” he remarked.
“When they understood a topic,
it gave me a lot of satisfaction
—made me feel like I made a difference at
least while they were here. This was more
valuable than a simple research experience
because it provided a way of interacting
with people outside of the lab. If we have
to explain our work at a conference, we
need to tailor our presentation to our
audience. Teaching this summer was a
good way practice that.”
“Some people might ask, ‘why care
about outreach when publishing papers
gets so much more recognition?’ We say,
it’s important because it helps our students
to grow in different ways,” said Dr. Gokirmak. He added: “With the grants that the
NSF gives us, we try to do something with
a broader impact.”
U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman speaks with
Mohammad Tehranipoor at the Information
Technology Engineering Building in February
2012. (Peter Morenus/UConn Photo)
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7
Senior Design Day 2012
O
n Friday, April 27, 2012, electrical and
computer engineering student teams
demonstrated fourteen innovative senior
design projects, many of which were sponsored
by companies and organizations across the
region. The sponsors for 2011-2012 projects
included Covidien, Hamilton Sundstrand, IEEE
AES Society, IMCORP, Lenze, National Transportation Security Center of Excellence, Phonon,
and Qualtech Systems.
Design day demonstrations are the climax
of a two-semester process in which student
teams seek to solve a manufacturing, software
or other product /process challenge, often in
close association with an industrial mentor or
other sponsor, and a faculty advisor. Throughout the year, students apply the core concepts
they learned in the classroom to their design
projects. These provide hands-on learning
opportunities and expose students to the challenges and satisfactions of solving real-world
dilemmas, from the problem definition stage to
prototype development.
New GAANNs in Engineering
T
he U.S. Dept. of Education has funded
three new three-year 2012 Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need
(GAANN) sites within the School of
Engineering. These programs will provide
$1.2 million for graduate student support.
One of the GAANN awards went to a
team led by Dr. John Chandy and will support doctoral students interested in developing advanced computer systems security
methodologies. This research focus builds
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upon, and extends, a previous successful
GAANN program for which Dr. Chandy
was also the lead. Dr. Chandy explains that
security is an increasingly urgent concern as
computer-driven devices become ever-more
pervasive in our daily lives. The brains
behind desktop computers, cell phones,
laptops, e-readers—even automobiles,
power plants, financial and communications
systems, and navigation devices—are hightech computers and microcontrollers. Their
electrical & computer engineering
pervasive integration into all facets of daily
life render computer systems vulnerable to
individuals who wish to disrupt and corrupt
the systems for financial, political or other
reasons. Dr. Chandy and his collaborators
(Drs. Bahram Javidi, Aggelos Kiayias, Jerry
Shi, Alexander Shvartsman, Mohammad
Tehranipoor, Bing Wang and Lei Wang),
seek to develop the next generation of agile,
savvy computer security experts who can
help the nation protect its vital systems.
ECE faculty profiles
Anwar, A F.
Professor; Fellow, SPIE;
Member, CASE
Quantum size effect devices;
transport in semiconductor
devices; high frequency noise
in electronic devices; GaN-based
high power devices
anwara@engr.uconn.edu
Ayers, John E.
Associate Professor
Semiconductor materials,
heteroepitaxial growth and
characterization; defect
engineering in heteroepitaxial
semiconductors; semiconductor
devices; VLSI fabrication
jayers@engr.uconn.edu
Bar-Shalom, Yaakov M.
Board of Trustees Distinguished
Professor & Marianne E. Klewin
Endowed Professor in Engineering;
Fellow, IEEE; Member, CASE.
Target tracking with radar,
sonar, and infrared sensors;
air traffic control, data fusion
for surveillance systems
with multiple sensors
ybs@engr.uconn.edu
Robert S. Lynch
Adjunct Lecturer
Distributed storage, clustered file
systems, networking, hardware,
parallel architectures, VLSI design
and automation
chandy@engr.uconn.edu
Enderle, John D.
Professor; Fellow, IEEE ASEE,
AIMBE, Rensselaer Alumni
Association Fellow and Uconn
Teaching Fellow; Member, CASE
Modeling physiological systems,
system identification, signal
processing, and control theory
jenderle@engr.uconn.edu
affiliated faculty
Molly Brewer
Research Professor
Chandy, John A.
Associate Professor &
Associate Head
Fiber optic high-speed digital
and high-frequency network
implementation; quantum
computing and communications
donkor@engr.uconn.edu
Applied electromagnetics
rajeev@engr.uconn.edu
Anthony DeMaria
Professor in Residence;
Member, NAE and NAS
Power electronics, motor drives,
electric machinery, and renewable
energy integration in micro-grids
bazzi@engr.uconn.edu
Donkor, Eric
Associate Professor; Fellow, SPIE;
Member, CASE
Bansal, Rajeev
Professor & Head; Fellow of
the Electromagnetics Academy;
Member, CASE
Steven K. Boggs
Research Professor;
Fellow, IEEE
Bazzi, Ali
Assistant Professor
emeritus faculty
David Tonn
Adjunct Lecturer
Peter K. Cheo
Fellow, IEEE
David Jordan
Mahmoud A. Melehy
Robert B. Northrop
Martin D. Fox
David Kleinman
Fellow, IEEE
Charles H. Knapp
Matthew Mashikian
Fellow, IEEE
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ECE faculty profiles
Escabi, Monty
Associate Professor; Member CASE
Human perception of sound,
neuronal processing of sound
information, neuronal modeling
escabi@engr.uconn.edu
Khan, Omer
Assistant Professor
Computer architecture; large-scale
multicores; architectures for heterogeneity, energy-efficiency, reliability,
security, data and programmability;
scalable on-chip communication,
memory models and networks; hardware/software co-design
omer.khan@uconn.edu
Gokirmak, Ali
Assistant Professor
Nanofabrication, micro and
nanoelectronics, thermo-electrics,
electrical characterization,
transport, electrical materials
processing
gokirmak@engr.uconn.edu
Gupta, shalabh
Assistant Professor
Cyber physical systems,
distributed intelligent systems,
robotics, autonomous systems,
statistical learning and
perception, information fusion,
and fault diagnosis & prognosis
in complex systems
shalabh.gupta@uconn.edu
Jain, Faquir C.
Professor; Fellow, SPIE;
Member, CASE
Design & fab of sub-22nm FETs
& circuits; quantum dot
nanophosphor displays, lasers &
modulators; CNT biosensors
fcj@engr.uconn.edu
Luh, Peter B.
SNET Professor of Communications
& Information Technologies
Fellow, IEEE; Member, CASE
Planning, scheduling & coordination of design, manufacturing and
service activities; power system
market design and load/price
forecasting; energy smart and
safe buildings
luh@engr.uconn.edu
park, sung-yeul
Assistant Professor
Intelligent power conditioning
systems; energy conversion;
renewable energy integration;
microgrid and smart grid
applications
supark@engr.uconn.edu
Pattipati, Krishna R
UTC Professor of Systems
Engineering; Fellow, IEEE;
Member, CASE
Optimization, prognostics and
diagnostics, inference and
decision making under uncertainty, multi-object tracking
and adaptive organizations
krishna@engr.uconn.edu
Javidi, Bahram
Board of Trustees Distinguished
Professor; Fellow, IEEE, OSA, SPIE,
and AIMBE; Member, CASE
Optics for information systems,
3D imaging, 3D display, 3D image
processing, 3D image recognition,
bio sensing, biomedical imaging,
disease detection, bacteria identification, and information security
bahram@engr.uconn.edu
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electrical & computer engineering
Silva, Helena
Assistant Professor
Nanofabrication, micro and
nanoelectronics, thermo-electrics,
electrical characterization,
transport, electrical materials
processing
hsilva@engr.uconn.edu
ECE faculty profiles
Taylor, Geoff W.
Professor. Fellow, IEEE;
Member, CASE
Optoelectronic devices and
integrated circuits; advance
materials
gwt@engr.uconn.edu
Tehranipoor, Mohammad
Castleman Term Associate Professor
in Engineering Innovation
Computer aided design and test;
reliability analysis; hardware security and trust
tehrani@engr.uconn.edu
Zhou, Shengli
Charles H. Knapp Associate
Professor in Electrical Engineering.
Member, CASE
Wireless communications, signal
processing for communications,
and underwater acoustic
communication and networking
shengli@engr.uconn.edu
Zhu, Quing
Professor; Fellow, SPIE;
Member, CASE
Near infrared light imaging,
ultrasonic imaging, photo-acoustic imaging, optical coherence
tomography
zhu@engr.uconn.edu
Wang, Lei
Associate Professor
Low power, high performance
integrated Microsystems; design
methodologies for ASIC/SOC, and
VLSI signal processing algorithms
and architectures
leiwang@engr.uconn.edu
Willett, Peter K.
Professor. Associate Director,
BECAT. Fellow, IEEE
Detection, target tracking,
communication and
signal processing
willett@engr.uconn.edu
Zhang, Peng
Assistant Professor
Smart grid, power systems
reliability, grid integration of
wind and solar energy, real time
power system simulation,
and power quality
peng@engr.uconn.edu
Industrial Advisory Board
Zahi Abuhamdeh, TranSwitch
Frank Chan, Naval Undersea Warfare Center
Anthony DeMaria, Coherent
Jim Fahrny, Comcast
Robert Madonna, SAVANT
Diana Mahoney, Northeast Utilities
Tom Martin, Phonon
Don Masters, Pratt & Whitney
Eric Mueller, Coherent
Edmond Murphy, JDS Uniphase
Venk Mutalik, ARRIS Access and Transport
Eric Reed, General Electric
Theodora Saunders, Sikorsky
Daniel Serfaty, Aptima
Paul Singer, General Electric
Leo Veilleux, Hamilton Sundstrand
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Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
371 Fairfield Way, Unit 4157
Storrs, CT 06269-4157
Address Service Requested
Alumnus profile
Daniel E. Noble
O
ne of the department’s most renowned
graduates is Daniel E. Noble (‘29),
who is widely regarded as a pioneer in
mobile communications and semiconductors. Dr. Noble, a native of Naugatuck, CT
and a radio enthusiast, earned his bachelor’s
degree in electrical engineering at what was
then called the Connecticut State College
(now UConn). He also earned his doctoral
degree from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and then returned to teach at
UConn (1924 -1940).
While at UConn, he designed, built
and operated the college radio station and
developed expertise in the area of FM,
or frequency modulation, the technology
used in mobile radios. Impressed with his
work in Storrs, two Hartford radio stations
sought him out and asked him to build
relay stations for them. For one of the
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stations, Dr. Noble built one of the first FM
broadcast stations. This expertise attracted
the attention of law enforcement agencies
eager for better communications devices in
squad cars. Working with the Connecticut
State Police, Dr. Noble developed the
nation’s first two-way radio state police
communications system.
This remarkable achievement also drew
the attention of Paul Galvin, founder of
the Galvin Manufacturing Corp., which
later became Motorola Corporation.
Mr. Galvin recruited Dr. Noble in 1940
to serve as Director of Research at the
Chicago manufacturing company. Motorola
credits Dr. Noble not only with conducting
groundbreaking work in field of radio
communications but also with recognizing
the significance of the transistor’s potential
soon after it was invented in the late 1940s.
electrical & computer engineering
Non-Profit Org.
US Postage
Paid
Storrs, CT
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