Distinguished Microwave Lecturers

Richard Cameron gained his BSc in Electronics with Telecommunications at the University of Loughborough in 1969. He subsequently joined the Marconi Space and Defence Company to begin a career devoted to the design and R&D of microwave equipment and systems for spacecraft and associated ground stations.

 

In 1975 Professor Cameron joined The European Space Research and Technology Establishment (ESTEC), the technical branch of the European Space Agency (ESA) based in the Netherlands. Here he was involved in the development of software for the design of advanced microwave equipment for space application, particularly microwave filters. He was also responsible for the monitoring of contracts for microwave equipment for telecommunications, radar (earth observation), scientific, TV broadcast and inter-orbit relay spacecraft. In addition he delivered several lecture series on the computer-aided design of microwave filters to national space agencies.

In 1984 Prof. Cameron joined the ComDev company of Canada to assist in the establishment of the European branch of ComDev - ComDev Europe - based near London, England. This involved laying down the design foundations for the production of passive microwave devices and sub-systems for space application, and later for cellular communication systems. As the company grew, activities tended towards technical management and improving CAD methods for both ComDev in Europe and in Canada.

Prof. Cameron retired from CDE in 2005, but retained a consultancy role with the Company on an ad hoc basis. Since retirement he has conducted several short lecture series for undergraduate and post-graduate students in Hong Kong and the UK. He has also been appointed a Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds.

During his career Prof. Cameron has filed 8 patents and has authored or co-authored many papers for technical journals and conferences. He is also the co-author of a technical book, Microwave Filters for Communication Systems - Fundamentals, Design and Applications.

J.C. Chiao received his Ph.D. degree at California Institute of Technology in 1995, and served as a Research Scientist at Bell Communication Research, Assistant Professor at University of Hawaii, and Product Line Manager and Senior Technology Advisor at Chorum Technologies from 1996 to 2002.

He joined UTA as an Associate Professor in 2002. He is now a Jenkins Garrett Professor of Electrical Engineering and Joint Biomedical Engineering Program at University of Texas - Arlington; and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Internal Medicine Department at UT-Southwestern, Medical Center.

Dr. Chiao is a senior member of IEEE. He has published numerous peer-reviewed papers, edited several proceedings and books, and chaired several international conferences. He obtained five awarded and six pending patents. He received the 2011 O'Donnell Award in Engineering presented by The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST). He also received the 2011 Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex Technology Business Council Tech Titan Technology Innovator Award, and 2011 Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company Excellence in Engineering Teaching Award. His webpage is at http://www.uta.edu/faculty/jcchiao/

Madhu S. Gupta received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is presently both an Adjunct Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at University of California, San Diego and the RF Communications Systems Industry Chair Professor at San Diego State University. Along with his other technical interests, his work concerns noise and fluctuations in devices that are active, nonlinear, very small, or used in high-speed/high-frequency applications. Dr. Gupta is an IEEE Fellow; has served as the Editor of IEEE Microwave and Guided Wave Letters and IEEE Microwave Magazine and of three IEEE Press books; has been a conference organizer and Chair of Technical program Committee of IMS2010; and has received the 2008 Distinguished Microwave Educator Award from IEEE Microwave Theory & Techniques Society in addition to a number of awards for outstanding teaching. He also firmly believes that every technical talk should be entertaining, enlightening, and inspiring. Dr. Gupta is presently the President-Elect of the IEEE Microwave Theory & Techniques Society (to become the President in 2013).

Shiban K Koul received the M.Tech and PhD degrees in Microwave Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India, where he is currently employed as a full Professor. He is also the Chairman of Astra Microwave Products Limited, Hyderabad, a major company involved in the Development of RF and Microwave systems in India.  His current research interests include: RF MEMS, Device modeling, Microwave and Millimeter wave IC design and Reconfigurable microwave circuits including antennas.

 

Dr. Koul has successfully completed 24 major sponsored projects, 50 consultancy projects and 35 Technology Development Projects.  He is the author/co-author of 195 Research Papers and 7 state-of-the art books. He holds 6 patents and 6 copyrights. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, USA (IEEE), Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), Fellow of the Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers (IETE), Member of the Micro and Nano Technology Foundation (MANCEF), USA, Member of the Indian Society of Smart Materials (ISSS), Chief Delegate for world Micro machine Summit from India.  He is the Chief Editor of IETE Journal of Research,  Associate Editor of the International Journal of Microwave and Wireless Technologies, Cambridge University Press, a member of the National Committee for URSI Commissions B, academic expert member on the board of smart materials and research (B-smart) and a member of the national committee of COSPAR-URSI-SCOSTEP. He is on the Editorial boards of the Journal of IETE and the Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, John Wiley, USA.  He had delivered more than 155 invited technical talks at various international symposia and workshops.

 

Dr. Koul has been a member of the IEEE for the past 30 years. He has served as the Chairman of IEEE ED/MTT Chapter, India Council in (1988, 89, 1992, 93, 94, 95). He has also been a  member of the executive committee of the IEEE Delhi Section and  IEEE ED/MTT Chapter, India Council. He was the past chairman of the Fellow and awards nomination committee of IEEE Delhi Section. Currently, he is the Chairman of Delhi section and also chairman of the Microwave Theory and Techniques Chapter under Delhi section. He is currently a serving ADCOM member and  a Member of IEEE MTT societyâ

Earl McCune received his BS/EECS degree from UC Berkeley, his MSEE (Radioscience) from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. from UC Davis in 1979, 1983, and 1998 respectively.  He is a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur, founding two successful start-up companies since 1986: Digital RF Solutions (1986-1991, merged with Proxim) and Tropian (1996 - 2006, acquired by Panasonic).  He is now retired from his position as a Technology Fellow of Panasonic, and is an author, instructor, and independent consultant.  He is currently an instructor for Besser Associates for both Practical Digital Wireless Signals and Frequency Synthesis Principles. He holds 58 issued US patents, and is the author of Practical Digital Wireless Signals (Cambridge 2010).

 

In his nearly 40 years of experience in the wireless communications industry he has worked in areas including technology development, circuit design, along with systems architecture and integration.  This experience has been gained at NASA, Hewlett Packard, Watkins-Johnson, Cushman Electronics, Digital RF Solutions, Proxim, Tropian, and Panasonic.  The start-up Digital RF Solutions pioneered modulated direct digital synthesis (DDS) technology for very high dynamic range transmitters.  Tropian developed and implemented envelope tracking and polar modulation techniques for highly efficient, multiband and multi-mode linearized power amplifiers.

 

Dr McCune has presented at ten (10) IMS/MTT workshops since 2000, and has been an invited speaker at RWS, PA Symposium, WAMICON, ISCAS, WCNC, and ISSCC.  He has served on the CICC technical program committee (TPC) since 2000, and also served on the TPC for RWS and the PA Symposium.  He is a regular reviewer for IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, and the Transactions on Circuits and Systems.  He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and is a member of the MTT, Communications, Solid State Circuits, Vehicular Technology, Aerospace Engineering, and Circuits and Systems Societies.

 

Natalia K. Nikolova received the Dipl. Eng. (Radioelectronics) degree from the Technical University of Varna, Bulgaria, in 1989, and the Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering) degree from the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan, in 1997. Her Ph.D. studies in Japan (1994 to 1997) were supported by a scholarship from the Government of Japan. From 1998 to 1999, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), during which time she was initially with the Microwave and Electromagnetics Laboratory, DalTech, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada, and, later, for a year, with the Simulation Optimization Systems Research Laboratory, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada. In July 1999, she joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McMaster University, where she is currently a Professor.
Her research interests include theoretical and computational electromagnetism, microwave imaging with applications in biomedical diagnostics and concealed weapon detection, nondestructive testing and security, as well as algorithms for computer-aided high-frequency design. She has published more than 85 papers in engineering and physics journals, and has contributed to more than 115 refereed conferences in the fields of microwave and antenna engineering, electromagnetic theory, numerical methods, etc. Prof. Nikolova has given numerous invited lectures and presentations on the topics of microwave imaging, computer-aided analysis and design, and system sensitivity analysis.
Dr. Nikolova held a University Faculty Award of NSERC from 2000 to 2003, renewed to 2005. Since 2008, she is a Canada Research Chair in High-frequency Electromagnetics.
She is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society and the Antennas and Propagation Society. She was appointed a Distinguished Microwave Lecturer in 2011. Prof. Nikolova is also a correspondent of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) and a member of the Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society (ACES). She is a registered Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario, Canada.

Takashi Ohira received the B.E. and D.E. degrees in communication engineering from Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, in 1978 and 1983. In 1983, he joined NTT Electrical Communication Laboratories, Yokosuka, Japan, where he was engaged in research on monolithic integration of microwave semiconductor devices and circuits. He developed GaAs MMIC transponder modules and microwave beamforming networks aboard national multibeam communication satellites, Engineering Test Satellite VI (ETS-VI) and ETS-VIII, at NTT Wireless Systems Laboratories, Yokosuka, Japan. From 1999, he was engaged in research on microwave analog adaptive antennas (ESPAR antenna) and wave-engineered secret key generator devices at ATR Adaptive Communications Research Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan. Concurrently he was a Consulting Engineer for National Space Development Agency (NASDA) ETS-VIII Project in 1999, and an Invited Lecturer for Osaka University from 2000 to 2001. From 2005, he was Director of ATR Wave Engineering Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan. Currently, he is Professor of Toyohashi University of Technology. He is working on unified theory of Q factors in resonators and oscillators. He is also establishing an RF powering technology for running electric vehicles. He coauthored Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (Tokyo: IEICE, 1997). Prof. Ohira was awarded the 1986 IEICE Shinohara Prize, the 1998 APMC Prize, the 2004 IEICE Electronics Society Prize, and the 2012 CEATEC Semi Grand Prix. He served as Chair of APMC International Steering Committee and Chair of URSI Commission C. He serves as Chair of IEICE Microwave Technical Committee. He is an IEEE Fellow. He founded two regional chapters in IEEE MTT Society (Kansai Chapter in 2006 and Nagoya Chapter in 2010). He is an award councilor for European Microwave Association.

Tomas Palacios is the Emmanuel Landsman Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the Advanced Semiconductor Materials and Devices Group. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of California - Santa Barbara, and a B.Sc. degree from the Polytechnical University of Madrid, Spain. His research focuses on the development of the combination of new semiconductor materials and device concepts to advance the fields of information technology, biosensors and energy conversion. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including, the 2011 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the 2010 Young Investigator Award of the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors (ISCS), the 2009 NSF CAREER Award, the 2009 ONR Young Investigator Award, the 2008 DARPA Young Faculty Award, and numerous best paper awards. Prof. Palacios has authored more than 200 contributions on advanced semiconductor devices in international journals and conferences, 40 of them invited, 3 book chapters and 8 patents.

Jeffrey Pawlan (M 1989, SM 1996) has been a consultant as owner of Pawlan Communications for 25 years. Prior to that, he had worked for many companies in California in very diverse areas of analog, RF, and microwave design and has been an engineer for 40 years. Some of his work was for NASA projects including the very successful design of the SARSAT/COSPAS search and rescue satellite ground stations. He also taught engineering part-time. Born and raised in the Los Angeles area, he attended UCLA and several other universities. He enjoyed learning many different fields and has 13 years of higher education including a Doctorate degree.

He has worked on projects for consumer, industrial, and military applications covering a wide range of the spectrum from LF to 50GHz. In addition to his primary involvement with the MTT society, he is also a member of the UFFC (frequency control) concentrating on low phase noise oscillators and phase noise measurements, a member of the AP-S, and also the Communications Society. He has published several papers and has two patents. He is serving as a member on the IEEE SCV Section ExCom and also is on the ExCom of the Central Area, Region 6. He is a member of two MTT technical committees, MTT-9 and MTT-20.

He has been designing RF and microwave hardware for Software Defined Radio uses within instrumentation and military satellite communications since 1984. For the past nine years he has been concentrating on Software Defined Radio technology with his own radio designs including the development of very capable software and hardware. He has presented talks in a workshop at the 2010 IMS in Anaheim, the 2011 IMS in Baltimore, the 2012 IMS in Montreal, and also at chapter meetings and a short course.

He was a guest lecturer at the Czech Technical University of Prague in 2010. In 2011 he was a guest lecturer at the University of Aveiro Institute of Telecommunications in Portugal where he presented a one week course on RF design and SDR. In 2012 he was a guest lecturer at the Czech Technical University in Brno. He presented a half-day tutorial on SDR at the WAMICON conference in April 2012.
pawlan@ieee.org

Luca Pierantoni was born in Maiolati Spontini, Italy. He received the 'Laurea' degree (summa cum laude) in Electronics Engineering in 1988 and the Ph.D. degree in 1993 in Electromagnetics from the Department of Electronics and Automatics at the University of Ancona, Italy. 

From 1989 to 1995, he was with the same department, as a Research Fellow. From 1996 to 1999 he worked at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in the Institute of High-Frequency Engineering as Senior Research Scientist. In 1999 he joined the Department of Electromagnetics at the Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona, Italy as Assistant Professor. In 2002, he has been guest scientist at the Technical University of Munich. Presently, he is with the Department of Information Technology at the Polytechnic University of Marche.

His current research interests are in the investigation of the combined Maxwell-quantum transport problem in nanomaterials, the analysis of electrodynamics in nanostructures and in the development of computational techniques for the multi-physical modeling of micro- and nano-devices.

He is a member of the Italian University Network for the Physics of Matter (CNISM), the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), and he is the chair of the IEEE MTT-S "RF Nanotechnology" technical committee.

Dominique Schreurs received the M.Sc. degree in electronic engineering and Ph.D. degree from the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. As post-doc fellow, she was visiting scientist with Agilent Technologies (USA), Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (Switzerland), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA). She is now full professor at KU Leuven. Her main research interests concern the (non)linear characterization and modelling of microwave devices and circuits, as well as (non)linear hybrid and integrated circuit design for telecommunications and biomedical applications.

 

Prof. D. Schreurs signed up as IEEE Student Member in 1990, and got elevated to Fellow in Jan. 2012. She serves on the IEEE MTT-S AdCom since 2009, after election by the membership-at-large in 2008. She is currently Chair of the MTT-S Education Committee and also Associate Editor of the IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters. She is Distinguished Microwave Lecturer for the term 2012-2014.

Beyond IEEE, Prof. D. Schreurs also serves on the Executive Committee of the ARFTG organization. She was General Chair of the 2007 and 2012 Spring ARFTG Conferences. In 2002, she was one of the initiators and is now still co-organizer of the successful NVNA Users' Forum, held 3 times/year. She was also co-chair of the European Microwave Conference in 2008 and initiated the IEEE Women in Microwaves event at the European Microwave Week. She is also Associate Editor of the International Journal of Microwave and Wireless Technologies.

Prof. D. Schreurs is reviewer for all IEEE MTT-S journal publications as well as TPRC member of IMS and RWW. She is also reviewer for many MTT-S (co-)sponsored conferences as well as for other IEEE journals and conferences. She has been regularly session chair at conferences, and acted as judge for student competitions.

Prof. D. Schreurs is co-editor of three books, contributor to seven books, and (co-)author of about 100 journal papers and 300 contributions at international conferences.

John Wood received B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Leeds, UK, in 1976 and 1980, respectively.  He is currently Senior Scientist in Maxim Labs at Maxim Integrated Products, Inc, Sunnyvale, CA, where he is working on Envelope Tracking and Digital Pre-Distortion systems for wireless communications applications.  He was formerly a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff responsible for RF System & Device Modeling in the RF Division of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc, Tempe, AZ, USA.  His areas of expertise include the development of compact device models and behavioural models for RF power transistors and ICs, and linearization and pre-distortion of high-power amplifiers.  To enable and support these modeling requirements, he has been involved in the specification of high power pulsed I-V-RF test systems, for connectorized and on-wafer applications, and in the development of large-signal network analyzer (LSNA), loadpull, and envelope measurement techniques.  From 1997-2005 he worked in the Microwave Technology Center of Agilent Technologies(then Hewlett Packard) in Santa Rosa, CA, USA, where his research work has included the investigation, characterization, and development of large-signal and bias-dependent linear FET models for millimetre-wave applications, and nonlinear behavioural modeling using LSNA measurements and nonlinear system identification techniques.  Between 1983 and 1997 he was a Professor in the Department of Electronics at the University of York, UK, where his research and teaching interests covered semiconductor devices, RF and microwave circuits, IC design, and device modeling.

He has organized, co-organized, and presented at many workshops at IMS and RWS in recent years; he was on the Steering Committee for IMS 2006, and has been a member of the IMS Technical Program Committee for the past four years, currently Chair of SC-20 'High-Power Amplifiers'. He has been a member of the ARFTG Executive Committee from 2007-10, was the Technical Program Chair for the 70^th & 75^th ARFTG Conferences (2007, 2010), and the General Chair for the 78^th ARFTG Conference in Fall 2011.  He was Technical Program Chair for the IEEE Power Amplifier Symposium 2008, 2010, and was General Chair in 2009 and 2011. He is a regular reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory & Techniques, on Electron Devices, and on Circuits & Systems. He is author or co-author of over 120 papers and articles in the fields of microwave device and system modeling and characterization, and microwave device technology.  He is the co-author of Modeling and Characterization of RF and Microwave Power FETs (Cambridge, 2007), and co-editor of Fundamentals of Nonlinear Behavioral Modeling for RF and Microwave Design (Artech House, 2005). He received the ARFTG Technology Award in 2007.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the Microwave Theory and Techniques, and Electron Devices Societies.

Jianping Yao received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Université de Toulon, France, in December 1997. He joined the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, as an Assistant Professor in 2001, where he became an Associate Professor in 2003, a Full Professor in 2006. He was appointed University Research Chair in Microwave Photonics in 2007. From July 2007 to June 2010, he was Director of the Ottawa-Carleton Institute for Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to joining the University of Ottawa, he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, from 1999 to 2011.

 

Dr. Yao has published more than 380 papers, including more than 210 papers in peer-reviewed journals and 170 papers in conference proceedings. He is a Chair of numerous international conferences, symposia, and workshops, including the Vice-TPC Chair of the 2007 IEEE Microwave Photonics Conference, TPC Co-Chair of the 2009 and 2010 Asia-Pacific Microwave Photonics Conferences, TPC Chair of the high-speed and broadband wireless technologies subcommittee of the 2009-2012 IEEE Radio Wireless Symposia, TPC Chair of the microwave photonics subcommittee of the 2009 IEEE Photonics Society Annual Meeting, TPC Chair of the 2010 IEEE Microwave Photonics Conference, and General Co-Chair of the 2011 IEEE Microwave Photonics Conference. Dr. Yao received the 2005 International Creative Research Award at the University of Ottawa. He was the recipient of the 2007 George S. Glinski Award for Excellence in Research. Dr. Yao was selected to receive an inaugural OSA outstanding reviewer award in 2012.

 

Dr. Yao is a registered Professional Engineer of Ontario. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.

 

 

Thomas Zwick (S'95-M'00-SM'06) received the Dipl.-Ing. (M.S.E.E.) and the Dr.-Ing. (Ph.D.E.E.) degrees from the Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany in 1994 and 1999, respectively. From 1994 to 2001 he was research assistant at the Institut für Höchstfrequenztechnik und Elektronik (IHE) at the Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany. February 2001 he joined IBM as research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, USA. From October 2004 to September 2007 T. Zwick was with Siemens AG, Lindau, Germany. During this period he managed the RF development team for automotive radars. In October 2007 he became appointed as full professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. T. Zwick is director of the Institut für Hochfrequenztechnik und Elektronik at the KIT.

 

His research topics include wave propagation, stochastic channel modeling, channel measurement techniques, material measurements, microwave techniques, millimeter wave antenna design, wireless communication and radar system design. He participated as an expert in the European COST231 Evolution of Land Mobile Radio (Including Personal) Communications and COST259 Wireless Flexible Personalized Communications. For the Carl Cranz Series for Scientific Education he served as a lecturer for Wave Propagation. He received the best paper award on the International Symposium on Spread Spectrum Technology and Applications, ISSSTA 1998. In 2005 he received the Lewis award for outstanding paper at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference. Since 2008 he is president of the Institute for Microwaves and Antennas (IMA). T. Zwick became selected as a distinguished microwave lecturer for the 2013 - 2015 period. He is author or co-author of over 200 technical papers and over 20 patents.