Archives
A glance back at the stories making headlines:
12/11/19
The UB-IEEE Nano-Symposium is a showcase to demonstrate the outstanding research achievements by UB EE faculty and students in the field of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. The inaugural symposium took place on November 22, 2019.
12/5/19
Faculty, students, industry representatives, and government partners gathered for lectures and demonstrations related to 5G and the Wireless Internet of Things.
11/5/19
The SUNY Chancellor’s Awards acknowledge and provide system-wide recognition for consistently superior professional achievement and encourage the ongoing pursuit of excellence. In 2019, two members of EE were honored.
8/6/18
The President Emeritus and Mrs. Meyerson Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring, is UB’s highest honor given for undergraduate mentoring.
5/21/19
Graduate students from EE presented their research posters to faculty, staff, fellow students, and members of the community during annual Student Poster competitions.
12/21/18
Students studying the Internet of Things at EE show their final projects to the community each year.
9/1/18
Researchers in electronics, communications and energy systems joined EE in 2018.
8/6/18
EE graduates have planted roots in WNY, taking advantage of Buffalo's favorable climate for new business and technology ventures.
8/6/18
EE graduate student Nan Zhang received the Harold O. Wolf Award which recognizes high achieving students who distinguish themselves through research, academic coursework and extracurricular activities.
7/6/18
Edward P. Furlani, UB engineering professor and fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, whose pioneering work in microfluidics, inkjet systems, optoelectronics and other fields is recognized worldwide, died suddenly July 3. He was 65.
4/20/18
Christopher Scolese to receive the 2018 von Kármán Lectureship in Astronautics award.
4/20/18
A team of electrical engineering and MBA students took first place on April 10 in the University at Buffalo’s Henry A. Panasci Jr. Technology Entrepreneurship Competition.
4/18/18
Graduate students from EE presented their research posters to faculty, staff, fellow students, and members of the community during the annual Graduate Student Poster competitions at the Department and School-Wide Levels.
4/18/18
Philip Schneider, BSEE'14, MS'16, conducted research in health care wearable technologies, biometrics and test phantoms under the supervision of Professor Kwang Wook Oh.
2/1/18
Professor Su was recognized for his “contributions to multi-input multi-output (MIMO) wireless communications and cooperative networks.”
1/26/18
EE Senior and UB IEEE Student Chapter President Maggie Donnelly is among student leaders in important roles that challenge engineering stereotypes.
1/5/18
Paras Prasad, executive director of the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics at the University at Buffalo, has been named a Fellow of IEEE, a professional association devoted to advancing technology for humanity.
12/20/17
Edward P. Furlani, whose pioneering work in microfluidics, inkjet systems, optoelectronics and other fields is recognized worldwide, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
12/18/17
The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences recognized eight members of EE for excellence in 2017.
5/30/17
Professor Sun was honored for his superior research achievements in electrical engineering.
6/30/17
Professor Sun was honored for his superior research achievements in electrical engineering.
4/18/17
PhD candidate Phil Schneider presented “Test Phantom Fingers for Higher Biometric Security.”
5/10/17
A new tradition honoring academic achievement in coursework and the graduate comprehensive exam has started at EE!
5/1/17
Graduate students from EE presented their research posters to faculty, staff, fellow students, and members of the community during the annual Graduate Student Poster competitions at the Department and School-Wide Levels.
3/1/17
Paras Prasad has been honored by leading professional societies in the fields of both Optics and Photonics (OSA, The Optics Society) and Engineering (IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).
12/13/16
Jarrett Franklin received the Academic All-MAC honor for excellence in athletics and academics.
11/30/16
The EE Alumnus also served as Director of the National Science Foundation.
11/3/16
EE Alumnus Bilel Neji is head of product design and development at Bak USA, a social/business enterprise in downtown Buffalo.
7/8/16
EE Assistant Professor, Qiaoqiang Gan, has been honored as a UB Exceptional Scholar Young Investigator. The award is presented to untenured researchers whose work has garnered universal acclaim or completed under the auspices of a prestigious fellowship grant.
5/23/16
The UB Space Bulls earned a place in the prestigious NASA and NIA RASC-AL Robo-Ops Planetary Rover Competition.
3/31/16
EE Alumnus, C.L. Max Nikias, honored for his diversity efforts as a leader in higher education
4/4/16
Three EE students have been awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship. Kristina Monakhova, Andrea Martinez and Luke Zakrajsek have received this honor in support their pursuit of graduate study in electrical engineering. Alec Cheney, also of EE, received an Honorable Mention.
2/29/16
George Sklivanitis wins for StegoPASS, a system that detects the proximity of a user’s smartphone to his or her computer using ultrasound signals for increased digital security.
1/22/16
EE Ph.D. Candidate, Salih Salahli (advisor Natalia Litchinitser) won the student poster competition at the ARO MURI Program Review meeting on Filamentation Science.
11/20/15
Peiran Song's paper, "Decomposition by Partial Linearization: Parallel Optimization of Multi-Agent Systems" has been selected for the 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award.
6/12/15
A third-place finish for the team is their best yet in this prestigious competition.
4/7/15
Kristina Monakhova, an electrical engineering major from Liverpool, NY, will receive a Goldwater scholarship, a prestigious national honor that supports undergraduates studying science, mathematics or engineering.
10/17/14
Kristina Monakhova, a junior majoring in Electrical Engineering, has been selected to receive the John R. Sevier Memorial Scholarship Award by the Universities Space Research Association.
6/18/14
EE is proud to announce that alumnus and adjunct professor John K. Schneider's company
Ultra-Scan, has been inducted into the Small Business Innovation Research (
SBIR) Hall of Fame.
5/8/14
Kevin Burke has been commended, once again, for his dedication to students and teaching.
4/25/14
The Department of Electrical Engineering held its annual Graduate Student Research Poster Competition with many fantastic entries. Poster Competition winners are:
4/14/14
It was EE against EE, but all in good fun at EE's Undergraduate Soccer Tournament.
4/3/14
Fourteen members of the IEEE Student Branch at UB traveled to the New Jersey Institute of Technology to participate in the IEEE Region 1 Student Conference.
3/15/14
UB took second place at the SAE Snowmobile Challenge, an engineering design competitionthat challenges engineering students to reengineer an existing snowmobile to reduce emissions and noise.
2/12/14
Jennifer Zirnheld chosen to serve on the faculty steering committee of RENEW (Research and Education in eNergy, Environment and Water).
1/27/14
EE Senior Andrew Tennenbaum has been named to the Theta Tau Educational Foundation's innaugural All-Academic Team.
Tennenbaum, along with 90 others from Theta Tau chapters throughout the United States, were selected based on high grade point average in the previous semester and active engagement in their chapters. The average GPA among all honorees was 3.6.
9/12/13
The Buffalo News reported on EE senior and UB Bulls football player Derek Brim and the successful balance he's achieved between athletics and academics. See more at:
Brim is Leaving His Mark at UB9/2/13
Andrea Martinez has been awarded the Hispanic Women's League Scholarship for 2013. The League is committed to maintain a scholarship fund to provide financial assistance to Hispanic women who wish to pursue higher education. In order to be considered, students must demonstrate academic achievement, community participation, and financial need. In addition, students must have an overall GPA of 2.75 or higher and document to attend college in the fall of 2013.
8/22/19
Michael Sparks won second place in the Henry A. Panasci Jr. Technology Entrepreneurship Competition held at the University at Buffalo. The competition is designed to bring students from different educational backgrounds together to create vaiable businesses in Western New York. The second-place award of $10,000 went to Michael Sparks for his business, Sticker Lights (StickerLights.com), which produces customizable, USB-powered illuminated stickers for laptop branding. As part of the BSEE/MBA Program, Sparks graduated from UB in May 2013 with a BS in electrical engineering and an MBA from the School of Management. He recently gained another accolade for this project, start-up funding from UB eLab, a boot camp for business students. More details can be found in the UB Reporter.
2/28/19
Kevin Burke has received the teacher of the year award from engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi. Each year they award the teacher of the year award to an outstanding faculty member for their teaching achievements and to commend them for their contributions to engineering students.
1/14/20
EE is proud to announce that 13 students have received the IEEE Power and Energy Society Scholarship. The award reconizes high achieving electrical and computer engineering majors with strong GPAs, distinctive extracurricular activities and a commitment to exploring the power and energy field. Congratulations to EE's winners: Nicolas Baldenko, Eric Bartkowiak, Brandon Colling, Nick Davis, William Dellanno, Ian Farneth, Joseph Materski, Kevin Mei, Dustin Muscato, Massamba Samb, Wiliam Schubert, Ryan Thorne, Frank Walsh. More details can be found at:
2012 PES Scholars by region – IEEE PES Scholarship Plus Initiative™2/28/19
Professor Pao-Lo Liu has received a grant from NY State as a member of 3 PI team, one from each of the following SUNY campuses: Stony Brook, Binghamton and Buffalo. The total award is $615,000 over 3 yrs, for all campuses.
The three campuses have been collaborating for the last six years to offer online courses in Electrical Engineering. In 2011, the NY State Education Department approved the program as an upper-division Bachelor of Science degree program in Electrical Engineering at Stony Brook University. Faculty from Binghamton and Buffalo continue to support the program by teaching some of the online electrical engineering courses at Stony Brook University as adjunct faculty.
The broad objective of this grant is to expand the program and provide online professional engineering education to the technical work force in New York and the nation. To accomplish this overall goal, specific objectives include expanding the offering of high-quality online laboratory courses, seeking ABET accreditation, offering faculty support for online teaching, instructional designs and course development and providing a model for partnership within SUNY campuses that embraces the Open SUNY concept in which students can take online courses among SUNY campuses as outlined in the Chancellor’s Open SUNY Initiative.
7/17/17
The Electron Dynamics in Semiconductors, Opto-Electronics and Nano-Structures conference, known more simply as EDISON, is hosted in Buffalo for its 20th edition. EE Chair Jonathan Bird is the organizer of EDISON 20.
8/24/17
Professors Natasha Litchinitser and Alexander Cartwright were published in Scientific Reports.
8/24/17
Assistant Professor HyungSeoh Oh has received an award for his project "“Towards An Efficient AC Optimal Power Flow & Global Optimizer Solutions" from the Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions (CERTS).
Dr. Kwang Oh Featured in Lab on a Chip's 2012 Emerging Investigators Issue
1/10/13 - Dr. Kwang Oh has been featured in Lab on a Chip’s 2012 Emerging Investigators themed issue (impact factor: 6.5). Furthermore, images by Dr. Oh and his students are featured on the cover of the journal, describing a robust droplet fusion and sorting method for two parallel trains of droplets that is relatively insensitive to frequency and phase mismatch. Research by Dr. Oh was previously featured on the inside cover of the October 2011 edition of Lab on a Chip. Please click here to find the full article of Dr. Oh’s most recent work.
Dr. Jennifer Zirnheld Receives UB Faculty Award for Undergraduate Mentoring
Dr. Jennifer Zirnheld of the UB EE Department was among five faculty chosen to receive the UB Faculty Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity. The award seeks to recognize faculty that provide research and scholarship opportunities for undergraduate students that are not commonly available at many institutions and oftenresult in the creation of transformative educational experiences.
New Patent Issued to Prof. Adly Fam
A new patent (US8271572) for "Generating Partial Sums" was issued to Prof. Adly Fam of the UB EE department on September 18, 2012. The invention describes what might very well be the fastest available multioperand adder to date.
Journal on Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing Features Paper by Aaron Roof and Prof. Adly Fam
Invited paper by Aaron Roof and Adly Fam, “Automatic classification of multiple signals using 2D matching of magnitude–frequency density features,” has just been published (9/17/2012) in Springer Journal on Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing and is available as an 'Online First' via this Springer Link .
The paper is an extension of a conference paper that received Best Paper award in the Software Defined Radio Conference (November 2011) and is the basis of an invention adopted by UB.
New NSF Award for Dr. Steve Durbin
Dr. Steve Durbin, of both the EE and Physics Department, was recently granted a new National Science Foundation award titled, “EAGER: Earth Abundant Element Nitride Semiconductors Based on ZnSnN2.” The award is comprised of $ 239,973 in funding over 2 years starting September 1, 2012.
This project is focused on growth and characterization of high-quality single-crystal thin films of zinc tin nitride, a material predicted to have the right combination of properties needed for solar cell applications, but which to date has not been synthesized. The II-IV-nitride family is comprised of earth-abundant elements for which there already exists significant recycling infrastructure, making it of interest for device applications from both economic and environmental perspectives.
New NSF Award for Dr. Vladimir Mitin
Dr. Vladimir Mitin, with Co-Is Dr. Petrou Athos and Dr. Joseph Zawicki , has recently been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation for his project titled, "Synergy of Educational Tools for Teaching Electromagnetic Fields and Waves: Lab Experiments, Educational Java Applets, Numerical Modeling, Textbook with Power Point Presentations." The award is comprised of $199,973 in funding over 3 years, starting September 1, 2012.
This project seeks to develop a conceptually novel one-semester Electromagnetic Fields and Waves (EFW) course for engineering junior undergraduate students and establish a new undergraduate laboratory for teaching EFW.This novel approach to the teaching of EFW will be based on the interactive approach – experiment – theory – experiment– applications. Through experiments, educational Java applets, and software for numerical solutions, undergraduate students will actively learn the theoretical principles of EFW and develop a scientific approach, which promotes critical reasoning and creative thinking.
Prof. Natalia Litchinitser Featured in Science Magazine
EE's own Prof. Natalia Litchinitser has published an exciting new article titled, "Structured Light Meets Structured Matter," in the August 2012 edition of Science Magaizine. The article highlights innovative research that has developed as a result of synergies between metamaterials and singular optics. Dr. Litchinitser's work is further discussed in a follow-up article by the UB Reporter.
New NSF Award for Profs. Litchinitser and Cartwright
Professors Natalia Litchinitser and Alexander Cartwright were recently granted a new National Science Foundation award titled, “Submicron Remote Imaging using Specialty Fiber Coupled Hyperlens”. The award is comprised of $370,000 in funding over 3 years starting August 1, 2012.
The objective of this new NSF project is to develop fiber based hyperlens for ultra-high resolution optical imaging and endoscopy
New Award for Prof. Gan from UB Catalyst Fund
Prof.Qiaoqiang Gan was recented granted a new award from the Bruce Holm Memorial Catalyst Fund for his project titled, “A Prototype of Circular Plasmonic Mach-Zender Interferometer for Low-cost Multiplexed Biosensing.” The award is comprised of $50,000 for 1 year starting August 1, 2012.
This project aims to develop a circular plasmonic Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) biosensor to demonstrate a portable and parallel sensor system. By observing the output intensity emitted from the nanostructre in real-time, one can effectively screen biomolecular binding events and analyze the binding kinetics, which, importantly, is much cheaper than conventional SPR systems and extremely attractive to the market.
New NSF Award for Profs. Scutari and Melodia
Professors Gesualdo Scutari and Tommaso Melodia were recently granted a new National Science Foundation award titled, “Small: Toward Distributed Decision Making in Cognitive Radio Ad-hoc Networks Based on Bi-level Equilibrium Programming”. The award is comprised of $400,000 in funding over 3 years starting July 1, 2012.
The objective of this project is to look at the cross-layer design of cognitive radio networks from a different and novel perspective. The cross-layer design including the optimization of sensing parameters is formulated as a bi-level equilibrium problem, whose solution analysis is addressed using the advanced theory of variational inequalities. The project will contribute to the development of novel algorithms and tools that naturally implement vertical and horizontal decompositions across the network. This will lay the foundation for the next generation of cognitive networking technology.
EE PhD Student Wins Best Poster at IEEE Conference
EE student Eric Kozarsky was awarded Best Poster at the 38th IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists for the presentation of his poster titled, "Thin-Film ZnO/Si Heterojunction Solar Cells: Design and Implementation." The conference was held in Austin, Texas from June 3 - June 8, 2012. The winning poster was authored by Kozarsky and additional EE graduate students, Juyung Yun, Chong Tong, Xueli Hao, Jun Wang, and their advisor, Dr. Wayne A. Anderson.
EE Design Competition Winners Announced
Winners of the James J. Whalen Memorial Multistage Amplifier Design Competition have been announced in the following categories and prizes:
Most Unusual Circuit/Least Number of Parts ($250)- David Marks
Most Exceeded Design Parameters ($200 each)- Boris Yuditsky and Chris Adams
Participation in the competition was open to all undergraduates enrolled in EE353 and EE311. Congratulations to our winners!
UB EE Welcomes New Faculty Members
UB Electrical Engineering is pleased to welcome two new faculty members to the department. Dr. Zhi Sun and Dr. Cristinel Ababei will join the department in Fall 2012. Dr. Sun is coming to us from Georgia Tech where he comepleted his PhD in Electrical Engineering and served as a postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Ababei received his PhD from the University of Minnesota and previously worked as an Assistant Professor of ECE at North Dakota State University.
