Points of Pride
$20.1
million
19
52
8
3
Ohio State ECE
research expenditures
in the 2014-2015
academic year
Number of faculty
members who are
IEEE Fellows
2014
2015
Ohio State’s ECE department ranks 21st
among graduate programs listed in US
News and World Report (2016).
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
205 Dreese Laboratories, 2015 Neil Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210-1272
Education, research, and innovation,
all at the forefront of higher education,
occur every day in the ECE department
at The Ohio State University.
ELECTRICAL
& COMPUTER ENGINEERING
DEPARTMENT OF
Summer 2014-Summer 2015
Tenure-track faculty
members
Graduate enrollment
Research-track faculty
members
PhD
Clinical-track faculty
members
MS
Total Number of
Graduate
Students
(Sept. 2015)
230
276
New Applicants
471
1236
Number
Admitted
95 (20.1%)
215 (17.4%)
Number Enrolled
36
146
Average GRE
(quantitative)
165
(92nd percentile)
165
(92nd percentile)
ECE graduate program acceptance rates are less than
20%. Students in our PhD program averaged 92nd
percentile GRE quantitative scores.
Graduate students
2013
Professor Joel T. Johnson
COLUMBUS, OHIO
Permit No. 711
42 PhD
116Masters
213
Bachelors
Ohio State ECE alumni worldwide
2012
PAID
Degrees conferred
10,844
2011
From the Chair
NON-PROFIT ORG.
U.S.POSTAGE
Undergraduate students
2011
410
397
412
465
506
ECE enrollment grew significantly since the mid-2000s. In
autumn 2015, the department enrolled 506 PhD and MS
degree candidates, with an additional 919 undergraduates.
355
2012
358
2013
2014
373
358
2015
368
Pre-majors
459
878
544 917
548 906
551 919
Declared majors
Michael V. Drake
University President
David B. Williams
Monte Ahuja Endowed Dean’s Chair
Dean, College of Engineering
Joel T. Johnson
Department Chair
814
520
© The Ohio State University
Department of Electrical
& Computer Engineering
Ryan Horns
Public Relations Coordinator and Design
ece.osu.edu | 614-292-2572
Educate
Research
Lead
Innovate
2015
Annual Report
Our enrollment has continued near
historic highs over the past year, and
in the fall of 2015, the department
enrolled 506 graduate students
and 919 undergraduates. The high
enrollment trend indicates continued
student interest in electrical and
computer engineering, as well as the
continued outstanding quality of the
education we provide.
Our innovative Sophomore
Experience, which integrates stateof-the-art equipment and software
into a sophomore-only space for
learning, studying, and socializing, has
continued to provide challenging and
fun projects that introduce students
early-on to the ECE discipline. The
program underwent an assessment
of outcomes in the past year that
confirmed its success and identified
opportunities for enhancing the
program even further. We have also
continued to expand our online
instructional program through the Ohio
State Master’s of Global Engineering
Leadership degree.
ECE
ONLINE
ece.osu.edu
facebook.com/eceosu
twitter.com/OhioStateECE
go.osu.edu/ece-linkedin
youtube.com/user/ECEosu
meetup.com/OSUECE-Alumni
Our research has continued to have
a major impact at the national and
international levels. Selected projects
are described in this report, including
the department’s contribution to
NASA’s New Horizons mission to
Pluto, as well as projects in Mobile
Health Care Sensing and Intelligent
Transportation. More than 100 other
projects, across a wide spectrum of
electrical and computer engineering
areas, are currently in progress as well.
Ohio State
continues
to focus on
its role as
a leading
national
provider
of ECE
education and research. The
department’s graduate program was
ranked 21st in the 2016 US News and
World Report rankings.
Our faculty are international
leaders and have received multiple
international recognitions during the
past year, including the elevation of
Profs. Fernando Teixeira and Chi-Chih
Chen to IEEE Fellow status, the NSF
CAREER award of Prof. Lori Dalton,
and the ONR Young Investigator and
AFOSR Young Investigator Awards
of Prof. Yuejie Chi. Much of our
research is highly multidisciplinary and
involves collaborations throughout
our campus and with researchers at
other universities. These collaborations
are being expanded through the
university’s “Discovery Themes”
program (discovery.osu.edu) that is
supporting multiple new ECE faculty
positions being recruited in academic
year 2015-16.
You’ll find evidence of our innovative
spirit throughout this annual report,
from the work of our faculty, students,
and alumni. The news reported just
scratches the surface of all the great
things happening at Ohio State ECE.
Find even more of our story online at
ece.osu.edu.
Joel T. Johnson
Professor and Department Chair
Faculty
New Faculty, 2015
Fang Luo joined
ECE in 2014
as a Research
Assistant
Professor and
Director of
the Industry
Consortium
for the Center
for High
Performance Power Electronics
(CHPPE). Doctoral institutions:
Huazhong University of Science and
Technology and Virginia Tech.
Levent Guvenc
joined ECE in 2015
as a professor who
shares duties with
the Department
of Mechanical
and Aerospace
Engineering.
His research interests include
automotive control and mechatronics;
autonomous road vehicles;
cooperative mobility; applied robust
control and control of AFM. He earned
his PhD from Ohio State in 1992.
Abhishek Gupta joined
Jia “Kevin” Liu
ECE in 2015 as an Assistant
joined ECE in 2014
Professor in the areas
as a Research
of decentralized control,
Assistant Professor.
stochastic control theory,
His interests include
game theory, optimization,
wireline/wireless
auctions, electricity markets
communication
and information theory.
networks; big data
Gupta earned his PhD in
analytics and cloud
Aerospace Engineering
computing; smart grid
from the University of Illinois at Urbanatechnologies; cyber-physical systems;
Champaign in 2014.
communications and control; as well as
signal processing and information theory.
Ayman Fayed joined ECE
Doctoral institution: Virginia Tech.
in 2015 as Associate Prof.
and Director of the Power
Yinqian Zhang joined
Management Research
ECE in 2015 as an
Laboratory. He received his
assistant professor,
MS and PhD in ECE from
with shared duties
Ohio State in 2000 and 2004,
within the Department
respectively. His research
of Computer Science
interests include on-chip
and Engineering (CSE).
power grids for dynamic
He earned his PhD
energy distribution in highly-integrated systems,
in computer science
high-frequency switching regulators with on-chip
in August 2014. He
and on-package passives for SoCs, energyspecializes in computer security
harvesting platforms, and power conversion.
methods, including side-channel, cloud
Fayed joins ECE from Iowa State University,
computing and operating systems.
where he was an Associate Professor.
Selection of ECE awards and honors
Faculty
Students
• Yuejie Che, ECE Assistant Professor, Air Force Office of Scientific
Research’s Young Investigator Program (YIP) and Office of Naval
Research 2015 YIP.
• Graduate Research Associate Zeng Zhang, Best Paper Award,
2015 Electronic Materials Conference.
•C
hi-Chih Chen and Fernando Teixeira, elected IEEE Fellows.
• PhD student J. Landon Garry, Best Paper Award, 2nd Place, Signal
Processing Symposium in Poland.
•L
ee Potter, winner of the Eta Kappa Nu 2015 Fred H. Pumphrey
Distinguished Teaching Award.
• Markus Novak, placed in the NASA Galactic Cosmic Ray Ideation
Challenge awards.
•L
ori Dalton, assistant professor, five-year National Science
Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for
her work in optimal Bayesian methods for classification.
• Ye Shao and Cosan Caglayan, both won 2015 Graduate School
Presidential Fellowship Awards.
•Y
uan Zheng, professor, Ohio Third Frontier Technology Validation
and Start-up Fund, for his circular wave drive gear head that allows
for speed reduction in robotic rotational motions.
•H
aksu Moon, 2015 Graduate School Presidential Fellowship in
computational electromagnetics.
•B
etty Lise Anderson, professor, International Society of Photooptical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) Fellow.
•A
simina Kiourti, Senior Research Associate at the ElectroScience
Laboratory, was given the IEEE EMBS BRAIN Grand Challenges
Conference YIP Award.
•P
rofessor Longya Xu, United States Department of Energy’s “Next
Generation Electric Machines (NGEM)” Award.
• Kubilay Sertel, Ohio State’s 2014 Early Career Innovator of the Year
Award for the invention of the Terahertz camera.
Alumni and Innovation
Research and Outreach
• Sophomore Nicholas Smith, Big Ten Distinguished Scholars list,
2014-2015.
• Undergraduate student Vick Chhabria, Big Lots Youth in
Philanthropy Award, Ohio Association of Fundraising Professionals.
• Undergraduate student Clayton Greenbaum, Marian Wright
Edelman Award in education from the Ohio State Office of Student
Life.
• Cosan Caglayan, Doctoral Research Award, IEEE Antennas and
Propagation Society; ARFTG Roger Pollard Memorial Student
Fellowship in Microwave Measurement.
ECE Program Tops in Ohio State Outreach
The K-12 Engineering Outreach
program, led by ECE Associate
Chair Betty Lise Anderson and
assistant Clayton Greenbaum,
won the top Ohio State Office
of Outreach and Engagement
Recognition Award in May.
By earning the award, Anderson,
Greenbaum, and numerous
student volunteers involved,
now serve as the university’s
nominee for the national C. Peter
Magrath Community Engagement
Scholarship Award. The group
was also presented the Ohio
Ringel named 2015
Distinguished Scholar
ECE professor Steven Ringel
was named a 2015 Distinguished
Scholar this winter in a surprise
State Distinguished Community
Engagement Award.
The K-12 Engineering Outreach
Program has developed handson engineering projects for K-12
schools, as part of the Capstone
Design program. Members have
collectively visited more than
78 schools, summer camps,
after-school programs, STEM
clubs, scouts, 4H groups and
more, reaching the impressive
milestone of 11,000 K-12 student
contacts since 2008.
ceremony attended by Ohio
State President Michael
Drake. The award is the
highest research recognition
given by the university.
Ringel’s research is in wide
bandgap semiconductors and
photovoltaics. He leads the
university’s Institute for Materials
Research and is the Principal
Investigator of Ohio State’s
Materials and Manufacturing for
Sustainability Discovery Theme
Initiative. For more about Ringel’s
research visit go.osu.edu/ringel.
EcoCAR 3 is managed by
Argonne National Laboratory
and is sponsored by the
United States Department of
Energy. ECE students make
The NASA Soil Moisture
Active Passive satellite,
or SMAP, successfully
launched into space on
Jan. 31, 2015.
SMAP is now helping to improve the understanding and
management of global water and carbon cycles. ECE faculty
and students were intimately tied to the research that made
it all possible.
To learn more about the program and find videos of the
volunteers in action, visit go.osu.edu/K12-outreach.
Real-Time Robot
Two Ohio State PhD students want
to help the elderly by creating
personalized robots that can
simultaneously track and follow a
person around in real time.
up a significant portion of Ohio
State’s team. They are tasked
with designing, building and
demonstrating eco-friendly
innovative automotive
technologies within the 2016
Chevrolet Camaro automobile.
To learn more about the team
visit go.osu.edu/osu-ecocar3.
ElectroScience Lab graduate students involved in the
project include Jeff Ouellette and Mustafa Aksoy, as well
as post-doctoral researcher Alexandra Bringer and ECE
Chair and professor Joel Johnson.
SMAP uses both a radar and microwave radiometer to
monitor the Earth. Johnson’s team focused on separating
man-made Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) from the
natural microwave signals used in measuring soil moisture
levels.
Learn more online at go.osu.edu/ece-smap.
ECE students Sihao Ding and
Ying Li, advised by professor
Yuan Zheng, teamed up with their
computer science counterparts,
Qiang Zhai and Dong Xuan at
Ohio State, to make it happen.
From left, Ying Li and
Sihao Ding
Learn more about their research:
go.osu.edu/real-time-robot
Ertin advises
presidential
group
EcoCar 3,
Year One
winner
Ohio State’s EcoCAR 3
team won first place in the
Year One national advanced
vehicle technology multiuniversity competition.
SMAP
launches
Ohio State ECE Research
Associate Professor Emre
Ertin was among a group
of national experts asked to
advise a healthcare technology initiative created by President
Barack Obama. Ertin develops body sensors to gather patient data
for more personalized care. He recently spoke at the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Mobile
and Personal Technologies Workshop in California. Specifically, he
discussed wearable physiological sensors and how they relate to
patient behavior. Learn more at go.osu.edu/ertin
On July 14, the world saw the
first detailed images of Pluto in
history, thanks in part to several
Ohio State-trained electrical and
computer engineers.
Launched in 2006, NASA’s New
Horizons space probe spent nine
and a half years hurtling through
space, at speeds of 31,000 mph,
traveling more than 3 billion miles
before reaching Pluto.
Almost 10 years earlier,
researchers in ECE’s
ElectroScience Lab were busy assisting alumnus Ron Schulze,
lead engineer for the New Horizons high gain antenna subsystem.
His activities were performed through his role at the Johns
Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Schulze was joined in the New Horizons effort by former ECE
researcher Willie Theunissen, now a principal radio frequency
engineer at Lockheed Martin Space Systems. Two months of
brainstorming sessions with fellow Ohio State researchers led
to successful calibrations and testing of the dish inside ESL’s
anechoic chamber. Their work remains an achievement in
engineering that went on to be featured on the covers of countless
tech magazines, as well as National Geographic.
ECE Intelligent Transportation Systems researcher Arda
Kurt recently co-authored a paper with colleagues from
North Carolina A&T State University, in which they study how
advanced driver assistance systems may help safely resolve
complex road situations, like the dreaded left-hand turn at
intersections. The goal of the research is to develop driver
behavior models to make accurate predictions for different
reactions during pre-crash scenarios.
Learn more about the research at: go.osu.edu/intersection
Harvesting energy
Ohio State ECE innovations went
viral this year among tech enthusiasts
after the launch of Nikola Labs and
its first product - a smart phone case
that extends battery life by harvesting
wasted radio frequency (RF) energy and
converting it into direct current (DC).
Learn more about Ohio State’s role at go.osu.edu/pluto1.
Nikola Labs arose out of a collaboration
between IKOVE Capital Partners,
ECE researchers and the Technology
Commercialization Office at Ohio State.
The team won People’s Choice at the
New York Disrupt TechCrunch event,
and went on to earn an Ohio Third
Frontier grant to aid in their goals.
When the
lights go out
The technology for the smart phone
case was originally generated by ECE
professors Can Emre Koksal and
Ness Shroff. The two teamed up with
colleague Chi-Chih Chen to implement
the product, and with the help of Chen’s
student Roland Tallos, the group
created the fully-realized prototype.
During the summer of 2003,
electrical blackouts struck North
America, leaving more than 55 million people in the dark.
Safety at Intersections
Obama praises
ECE graduate
New Horizons journey to Pluto
From a public safety standpoint, it led to new questions: What if a
weapon of mass destruction left an entire state, or multiple states,
without power? In this scenario, anything from an electromagentic
pulse, to a nuclear explosion could leave entire portions of the
nation vulnerable.
Two at Ohio State ECE are leading multi-university efforts to find
out how to recover from such situations. Ness Shroff, chaired
professor in ECE/CSE, as well as ECE associate professor, Atilla
Eryilmaz, are guiding teams on finding solutions under a project
issued by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
The groups are looking to create models for response, potential
impacts, as well as solutions that fall within acceptable cost
restraints. Learn more at go.osu.edu/wmd-ece.
IKOVE now provides a platform for
this and future innovations out of the
department and a growing collaboration
with the university. Learn more about
Nikola Labs online, at: go.osu.edu/nl.
President Barack
Obama praised
ECE alumnus Ziad
Sankari (’10) as a
“pioneer” of healthcare technology during
a May White House press conference
for emerging entrepreneurs. Sankari
founded CardioDiagnostics, which
engineers wearable 24/7 GPS-enabled
heart rate monitors that improve longdistance communication of diagnostics and
preventive information to patients.
Alumnus
joins NAE
ECE alumnus Eric
Evans (’83, ’85, and
’88), director of the
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, was elected to
the National Academy of Engineering
for his work in the development of
remote sensing systems and military
defense. The status is considered
among the highest professional
achievements for American engineers.
Dybdal honored for lifetime achievements
Electrical Engineering graduate Robert Dybdal won this year’s
Distinguished Alumnus Award from the College of Engineering for his
lifetime achievements in satellite communications technologies. He
earned his MS and PhD from Ohio State in 1964 and 1968, respectively.
Since graduating from Ohio State, Dybdal has worked on satellites at the
Aerospace Corporation, where he went on to earn more patents than
any previous employee in the history of the company. He remains active with ECE as
an adjunct professor, research supporter at the ElectroScience Lab and member of the
department’s Campaign Committee. Watch a short video interview with Dybdal talking
about his ties to ECE at: go.osu.edu/dybdal-video.
Signs of success
Little-known fact: American Sign Language
(ASL) is the third most-used language in the
United States.
The problem, Ohio State ECE associate
professor Aleix Martinez said, is that
existing classroom and educational
materials provide little feedback for learning
such a visual language. In response to
this problem, he designed “An Online Tutor to Learn American Sign Language,” making
learning more accessible through unique interactive software. For his efforts, Martinez
was among the winners of the Summer 2015 Google Faculty Research Award.
Learn more about his work and the award online at: go.osu.edu/am-google.
Parker wins COE alumni award
ECE alumna Chakka Parker (’02 and ’04)
received the Ohio State College of Engineering’s
Texnikoi Outstanding Alumni Award. Texnikoi is
an undergraduate organization in the College of
Engineering that recognizes qualities of leadership,
integrity and personality as exemplified by active
participation and influence in extracurricular activities.
Each year members select one younger alumni in the College of
Engineering as a recipient of the award based upon achievements since
graduation. Parker is an Engineering Manager at Raytheon Company in
Dallas/Fort Worth and volunteers in alumni recruitment for Ohio State.
ECE Weekly
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Horns.1@osu.edu to join or head online to:
ece.osu.edu/ece-weekly-newsletter.