Research

UC Davis electrical and computer engineering (ECE) professor William Putnam’s lab received a National Science Foundation award for using vacuum electronics to generate entangled photons.  

On Friday, April 8, UC Davis' electrical and computer engineering (ECE) department's alumni, students, and professors presented groundbreaking research, creative projects, and inspirational stories at the annual UC Davis ECExpo. 

For the first time in university history, the W.M. Keck Foundation has awarded two research teams at the University of California, Davis, with $1 million each in the same award cycle. One grant will support the creation of new technology for communications and medicine that operates at wavelengths that are not currently utilized. Associate professors Josh Hihath and Sebastian Gomez-Diaz in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering are leading the research.

James Nelson, a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Professor Andre Knoesen are developing electronic measurement techniques to study the behavior of yeast cells during the making of wine.

“When I started working in this field, almost 13 years ago, the THz/mm-wave spectrum was one of the least-tapped frequency bands,” reflects UC Davis electrical and computer engineering (ECE) professor Omeed Momeni.

As a circuit and system designer Momeni finds this line of work exciting. Many innovative structures and ideas are needed to make circuits operational at that frequency range, and the potential future applications are promising.  

UC Davis electrical and computer engineering (ECE) professor Marina Radulaski earned a OneQuantum award from QuEra Computing. Presented at a ceremony on December 7 at the Q2B conference in Santa Clara, the OneQuantum awards recognize “those who have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of global quantum technology.”

Over many years of research, UC Davis electrical and computer engineering (ECE) professor Saif Islam has developed revolutionary new techniques to construct tiny and sensitive nanostructures for the massively parallel nano-manufacturing of electronics and photonics. 

Islam says the time has come to go beyond strictly silicon-based electronics components. In addition to the increasing cost of creating even smaller and more complex silicon-based devices, the material has inherent technical limitations.  

UC Davis electrical and computer engineering (ECE) professor Neville Luhmann and project scientist Yilun Zhu are carrying out research crucial to the operation of nuclear fusion energy. In particular, they are developing high-speed cameras capable of millimeter-wave imaging.  

Two UC Davis Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) postdocs, Soheil Salehi and Matthew Drescher, were recently named 2020 and 2021 Computer Innovation Fellows (CIFellows), respectively, by the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC).