Annual Report and Summary
2023-2024 Overview
Personnel Changes:
- One Associate Professor in Residence has departed- Amy Thompson.
- Three new faculty have become affiliated with ECE - Caiwen Ding from the School of Computing as well as Kazem Kazerounian, Georges Pavlidis and SeungTeon Kang from the school of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering.
- Two faculty, John Ayers and Eric Donkor, have announced their retirements effective Summer 2024.
Undergraduate Achievements:
- 2nd Robotics Engineering cohort of 17 students in Fall 2023
- Malik Francis (CMPE‘25) selected as McNair Scholar
- Frost Robotics club was awarded a $2,500 grant from Automated Building Systems, Inc.
- Senior Design team 2301, including Abram Rosario (EE ‘23), Alfred Lee (ECE ‘23), Uilliam Kutrolli (EE ‘23) and Dawid Karpiej (EE ‘23) received an Educational Progress Award from the IEEE International Future Energy Challenge.
- Malik Francis (CMPE ‘25) and Paul Zambrzycki (EE’24) were competitors at the Clean Energy Summit
- Undergraduate EE students Chengluo Lin, Kevin Medeiros, Devon Rojas, and Steison Ruiz received a best poster paper award at the 2024 CMOC Symposium.
- Senior Design team 2402 consisting of Spencer Albano, Matt Silverman, and Nicholas Wycoff won first place at the 2024 AFRL Software Defined Radio University Challenge. The team was advised by Shengli Zhou.
- Senior Design Winners:
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- 1st place: Team 2415: Robotic Perception Sensor Characterization Platform (joint with ME); Sponsor: Draper
Team members: Samuel Gresh, Hritish Bhargava
- 1st place: Team 2415: Robotic Perception Sensor Characterization Platform (joint with ME); Sponsor: Draper
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- 2nd place: Team 2402: AFRL SDR University Challenge; Sponsor: UConn ECE; Team members: Spencer Albano, Matt Silverman, Nicholas Wycoff
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- 3rd place: Team 2420: Automated Angle Table for AS5 (joint with CSE); Sponsor: OEM Controls; Team members: Mitchell Bronson, Alexander ReCouper
- Undergraduate student Hezekiah Theophile was selected as the March member of the month by the UConn chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers
Graduate Achievements:
- Bendong Tan,an advisee of Prof. Junbo Zhao, received the IEEE PES CT chapter Outstanding Young Engineer Award, as well as a Best Paper Award from the Int’l Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems. Bendong was also named an Outstanding Reviewer for the journals Transactions on Power Systems and the Journal of Modern Power Systems & Clean Energy.
- Jinxian Zhang, advisee of Prof. Junbo Zhao has received a second place Poster Award at the North American Power Symposium.
- Prize winners from the 2024 Connecticut Microelectronics & Optoelectronics Consortium poster competition include Abdulmajeed Almalki, advised by Faquir Jain, and William Stark, advised by Lei Wang.
- Alaa Selim won the best department poster for ECE, and Leila Chebbo won a People’s Choice award, at the College of Engineering Poster Competition. Leila Chebbo, advisee of Ali Bazzi, Alaa Selim and Soroush Vahedi, advisees of Junbo Zhao, won 1st, 2nd and 3rd place respectively in the IEEE/ECE Poster Competition.
- Ayah Abdallah and Zach DiMeglio won the Spring 2023 ECE TA awards for their outstanding service, and Steven Allaby, Abdulmajeed Almalki, and Nina Stefanovic won ECE TA awards for Fall 2023.
- Qian Yang, an advisee of Prof. Krishna Pattipati, has received a best paper award from the IEEE Transportation Electrification Conference 2023.
- New IEEE Systems and Controls chapter was formed and received $500 in funding from IEEE of CT.
- Incoming graduate student, Yingyi Tang was selected as a GE NextGen Scholar.
- Niranjan Raghunathan, Soroush Vahedi, Ketian Ye and Bendong Tan were selected to present at the best paper session at the IEEE PES 2024 General Meeting.
Faculty Achievements:
- Krishna Patipatti
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- Received the 2023 Distinguished Alumnus award from IIT Kharagpur.
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- With his grad student Adam Bienkowski had their TMPLAR project selected as a Future Navy Capability, meaning that TMPLAR will be operationalized for use by Navy Operators.
- Liang Zhang has been appointed as the Pratt & Whitney Associate Professor in Advanced Systems Engineering.
- Marten Van Dijk was awarded the “Test of Time” award at the 2023 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, for his work on Path ORAM.
- Junbo Zhou earned a number of awards including:
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- Outstanding Editor awards from the Journal of Modern Power Systems and Clean Energy, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, and CSEE Journal of Power and Energy Systems.
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- Two Best Paper awards from the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems.
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- Three recognitions for Outstanding Technical Report, for chairing two IEEE PES Technical Committee Working Groups.
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- Distinguished Individual Service Award for IEEE PES Technical Committee
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- Appointed as Castleman Professor of Engineering Innovation
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- Appointed as PI for new CyberCARED center, which will focus on cybersecurity in the power industry.
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- Recognized for highly cited papers in IET Energy Systems Integration Journal, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, and Journal of Modern Power Systems and Clean Energy.
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- Appointed Technical Committee Program Chair (TCPC) of IEEE PES Renewable Systems Integration Coordinating Committee.
- Zongjie Wang
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- Awarded $4.5M DOE Grant to Benefit Grid Reliability for Transmission and Distribution Systems.
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- With the group Equipe LPS/H2O, she has won the Hydrogen Optimization Prize from the Water Power Technologies office in the Department of Energy.
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- Appointed as the Eversource Energy Center Associate Director for DEI and Industry Workforce Training.
- Ali Bazzi was selected to become a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE)
- Necmi Biyikili was appointed as the Collins Aerospace Professor of Engineering Innovation.
- Bahram Javidi was appointed as SNET Professor of Communications & Information Technologies
- Faquir Jain was recognized as an outstanding reviewer for the Light: Science & Applications journal in 2023.
- ScholarGPS ranked UConn ECE #132 world-wide and #56 in the US. Bahram Javidi and Yaakov Bar-Shalom are ranked 55th and 95th globally respectively in ECE. In specific specialties, Yaakov is ranked #1 in sensor fusion, Bahram is ranked #2 in digital imaging, #5 in 3d reconstruction, #6 in optical engineering, Shengli Zhou is #2 in underwater acoustics, Peter Willett is #8 in underwater acoustics, Junbo Zhao is #9 in state observer, and Krishna Pattipati is #20 in cybernetics.
Outreach:
- Prepared and distributed a newsletter highlighting ECE achievements during the previous year.
- Quarterly email highlight updates to other department heads
- Promotional Lab Videos in development. Second is Prof. Yang Cao’s lab - see https://youtu.be/oBVkS7eNoD8
- Robotics outreach has included organization of a Husky Invitational Robotics event and First Tech Challenge on campus, as well as sending flyers about the new robotics program to First Tech Robotics clubs throughout New England and Tri-state area
- ECE Alumni LinkedIn group has over 600 members with more active updates of faculty and student successes.
AY 2023-2024 Student Data:
| Enrollment | Degrees Awarded AY23-24 | ||||||
| Total
Enrolled |
Male | Female | US
|
Int. | |||
| Undergraduate | |||||||
| Freshmen | 78 | 71 | 7 | 75 | 3 | B.S. | 56 |
| Sophomores | 98 | 78 | 20 | 92 | 6 | Minors | 0 |
| Juniors | 85 | 75 | 10 | 81 | 4 | ||
| Seniors | 112 | 99 | 13 | 106 | 6 | ||
| Total | 373 | 323 | 50 | 354 | 19 | ||
| Graduate | |||||||
| M.S. | 19 | 16 | 3 | 16 | 3 | M.S. | 6 |
| M.Eng. | 13 | 12 | 1 | 13 | 0 | M.Eng. | 0 |
| Ph.D. | 87 | 71 | 16 | 24 | 63 | Ph.D. | 17 |
AY 2023-2024 Senior Design Information
| # Projects/ Teams | 25 |
| # Students Participating | 61 |
| # Company Sponsors | 12 |
| $ Revenue from Sponsors | $ 73,000 |
RESEARCH
FY 2023-2024 Research Development Data
| Expenditures | Proposals Submitted | New Awards | |||
| Number | Value $ | Number | Value$ | ||
| Industry | $636,696 | 11 | $1,831,953 | 12 | $2,267,986 |
| Federal | $7,184,845 | 52 | $41,688,237 | 18 | $7,125,465 |
| State | $0 | 1 | $60,000 | 1 | $100,000 |
| Other | $151,043 | 2 | $176,000 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | $7,972,584 | 66 | $43,756,190 | 31 | $9,493,451 |
AY 2023-2024 Research Products Data
| Number | |
| # Patents Awarded | 3 |
| # Journal Papers | 88 |
| # Conference Papers | 97 |
Please provide the numbers of faculty and staff in each category.
| FT | PT | Total | |
| Faculty | |||
| Tenured/ Tenure Track | 26 | 0 | 26 |
| Research Faculty | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Post-Docs | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Teaching
(In-Residence, Visiting, etc.) |
0 | 0 | 0 |
| Adjunct | 0 | 2 | 2 |
| Total | 27 | 2 | 29 |
| Staff | |||
| Administrative | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Lab/ Technical | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Other | |||
Previous Annual Reports
