Dr. John Owens, Child Family Professor of Engineering and Entrepreneurship, has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This distinction rewards Prof. Owens for fundamental contributions to commodity parallel computing, particularly in the development of GPU algorithms, data structures, and applications.

“I am delighted to join such an illustrious group of scientists and engineers, including many of my most respected and accomplished colleagues at UC Davis,” said Owens.

Dr. Zhi Ding, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has just received the 2020 IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Education Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to education and mentorship for the advancement of telecommunication engineering.   

Professor Chen-Nee Chuah has been awarded the Child Family Endowed Professorship in recognition of developing state-of-the-art technology and products with commercial value to society and her distinguished nationally recognized scholarship.

Originally posted by Aditi Risbud Bartl

Richard C. “Dick” Dorf, professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering and of the Graduate School of Management, passed away on October 22, 2020. He was 86 and is survived by his wife Joy.

Dorf joined UC Davis as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1971. He was appointed dean of Extended Learning in 1972 and led the program until 1982. In 1981, he became a founding faculty member of the Graduate School of Management’s predecessor, the Graduate School of Administration.

By Rachel Steere

Assistant Professor William “Billy” Putnam joined the UC Davis Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in November 2018. His area of research is in optics and photonics. Specifically, he works on understanding and controlling electron and photon interactions at ultrafast timescales and ultrasmall spatial dimensions.

By Jocelyn Park

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and in response to California’s social distancing guidelines, the UC Davis Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) had less than two weeks to make an abrupt transition from in-person instruction to remote instruction. This shift to virtual instruction came with numerous challenges, especially in laboratory-based courses.

A story originally published by MathWorks on how Professor Knoesen converted ENG6 Engineering Problem Solving to a remote learning class in the Spring.

There is some exciting new hardware in one of the ECE labs. This week, Professor Marina Radulaski’s research group, R-Lab, received a state-of-the-art optical cryostat by Montana Instruments. The tool uses a closed-cycle helium process to cool samples in its cryogenic chamber to temperatures suitable for explorations of quantum information phenomena. The cryo-chamber can be accessed by lasers through several windows for optical experiments.

By Erkin Şeker, Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Graduate Studies

College of Engineering has recognized one outstanding teacher from each department with the Best Teaching awards. ECE Prof. William Putnam received this award in 2020. This award recognizes faculty who show a strong commitment to the college's mission and vision and consistently perform above and beyond to train and create the next generation of engineers and leaders. These award recipients were nominated and selected by their respective departments.

Please join us in congratulating Prof. Houman Homayoun for being awarded the GLSVLSI Service Award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). On the 30th anniversary of Great Lake Symposium on VLSI, ECE Associate Professor Homayoun received the service recognition award from the conference. This award is for his leadership role in 2018 and 2019 editions of the conference for several new initiatives he took that resulted in significant increase in attendance of the conference. 

Please join us in congratulating Prof. Josh Hihath and his team members M.P. Anantram (U of Washington), Meghdad Hajimorad (California State University—Chico), and Shawn Douglas (UCSF) on receiving an NSF Future Manufacturing Seed Grant. This project aims to establish a framework for scalable manufacturing of DNA-based electronics and to foster the development of a diverse workforce appropriately trained to advance the field.

Professor Saif Islam has been appointed a Senior Editor of the IEEE Access, starting on August 1, 2020. He served as an associate editor of this journal during 2016-20.

Professor Houman Homayoun's team at NSF CHEST Center have been awarded two new projects on the general topic of HW security and trust. One project is titled "NATE: A Neural Network Assisted Timing Profiling for Hardware Trojans Detection” which focuses on developing new methods to detect hardware trojans using the frequency profiling of fabricated chips.

Please join us in congratulating Prof. Erkin Şeker (Electrical and Computer Engineering) in collaboration with Prof.