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Endowed Chairs

Alan Willson
Professor of Electrical Engineering

Professor Alan Willson, Jr. is the Charles P. Reams Endowed Chair in the Electrical Engineering Department.

He received the B.E.E. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 1961, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Syracuse University in 1965 and 1967, respectively. From 1961 to 1964 he was with the IBM Corporation in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and was an instructor in electrical engineering at Syracuse University from 1965 to 1967. From 1967 to 1973 he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. Since 1973, Willson has been a faculty member of UCLA where he is now a professor of Electrical Engineering. He served as assistant dean for Graduate Studies in the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 1977 through 1981, and served as Associate Dean of the School from 1987 through 2001.

Prof. Willson is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the American Society for Engineering Education. From 1977 to 1979 he served as editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems. In 1980 he was General Chairman of the Fourteenth Asilomar Conference on Circuits, Systems, and Computers, and during 1984 he served as president of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.

M. C. Frank Chang
Wintek Professor of Electrical Engineering

Dr. Mau-Chung Frank Chang is the Wintek Chair Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department and the Director of the High Speed Electronics Laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Before joining UCLA, he was the Assistant Director and Department Manager of the High Speed Electronics Laboratory at Rockwell Science Center (1983-1997), Thousand Oaks, California. In this tenure, he successfully developed and transferred the AlGaAs/GaAs Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor (HBT) and BiFET (Planar HBT/MESFET) integrated circuit technologies from the research laboratory to the production line (now Conexant Systems and Skyworks). The HBT/BiFET productions have grown into multi-billion dollar businesses and dominated the cell phone power amplifiers and front-end module markets (exceeding 1 billion units/year). Throughout his career, his research has primarily focused on the development of high-speed semiconductor devices and integrated circuits for RF and mixed-signal communication and sensing system applications. He was the principal investigator at Rockwell in leading DARPA's ultra-high speed ADC/DAC development for direct conversion transceiver (DCT) and digital radar receivers (DRR) systems. He was the inventor of the multiband, reconfigurable RF-Interconnects, based on FDMA and CDMA multiple access algorithms, for ChipMulti-Processor (CMP) inter-core communications and inter-chip CPU-to-Memory communications. He also pioneered the development of world's first multi-gigabit/sec ADC, DAC and DDS in both GaAs HBTs and Si CMOS technologies; the first 60GHz radio transceiver front-end based on transformer-folded-cascode (Origami) high-linearity circuit topology; and the low phase noise CMOS VCO (FOM>-200dBc/Hz) with Digitally Controlled on-chip Artificial Dielectric (DiCAD). He was also the first to demonstrate CMOS oscillators in the Terahertz frequency range (324GHz). Dr. Chang has authored or co-authored over 270 technical papers, 10 book chapters, authored 1 book, edited 1 book and holds 20 U.S. patents. He was an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices (1999-2001) and served as the Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits in 1991 and 1992, and for the Journal of High-Speed Electronics and Systems in 1994.

He was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2008 for the development and commercialization of GaAs power amplifiers and integrated circuits. He was elected as a Fellow of IEEE in 1996 and received IEEE David Sarnoff Award in 2006 for developing and commercializing HBT power amplifiers for modern wireless communication systems. He was also the recipient of 2008 Pan Wen-Yuan Foundation Award for his fundamental contributions in developing AlGaAs/GaAs hetero-junction bipolar transistors. His recent paper "CMP Network-on-chip Overlaid with Multiband RF-Interconnect" was selected for the Best Paper Award in 2008 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA). He received Rockwell's Leonardo Da Vinci Award (Engineer of the Year) in 1992; National Chiao-Tung University's Distinguished Alumni Award in 1997; and National Tsing-Hua University's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2002.

Deborah Estrin
J. B. Postel Chair in Computer Networking
Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Professor Deborah Estrin of the UCLA Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Departments holds the Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Computer Networking in recognition of her ground-breaking research.

This position was established by Dr. Postel's former colleagues to honor and recognize his extraordinary achievements in the networking field over the course of his 30-year career as a leading spokesman and architect of systematic organization in the rapidly growing online community. "Having worked with Jon Postel for many years as a researcher in his Computer Networks division, and as a member of the larger Internet research community, the Chair is particularly meaningful," says Prof. Estrin.She is also Director of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), an NSF Science and Technology Center. CENS is a major research enterprise developing wireless sensor systems and applying this revolutionary technology to radically transform critical scientifi c and societal applications. In 2003, Estrin was named one of Popular Science's Brilliant 10, an annual list of young scientists conducting ground-breaking work, for her research in embedded sensor networks and its applications in environmental monitoring.

Tatsuo Itoh
Northrop Grumman Chair in Microwave and Millimeter Wave Electronics
Professor

Professor Tatsuo Itoh, Northrop Grumman Chair in Microwave and Millimeter Wave Electronics, is a pioneer in electromagnetic engineering for microwave and wireless components, and heads the UCLA EE Department Microwave Electronics Laboratory. The laboratory has been engaged in a number of research projects, ranging from theoretical investigation to practical implementation of various microwave-related topics. The laboratory is working on enhancing the capability of retrodirective array for automatic target tracking and communication. Prof. Itoh's group has accomplished several unique capabilities previously unavailable, including a retrodirective array that can be reconfi gured from the retrodirective mode to a direct conversion receiver/transmitter. The laboratory has also spearheaded the research and development of microwave applications of metamaterial structures.

Unlike other research efforts in the world working on this subject, Prof. Itoh and his group have invented a uniquely different approach that provides low loss broadband capability. They have developed many microwave components with unusual or unique capabilities, including an electronically controlled antenna with 180 degree coverage and a variable radiation pattern, a very compact directional coupler, dual band circuits for high power high effi ciency amplifiers, etc. A spin-off project is the development of small antennas for wireless communication (ten times smaller than conventional antennas).

Yahya Rahmat-Samii
Northrop Grumman Chair in Electromagnetics
Professor

Professor Yahya Rahmat-Samii was recently selected to hold the Northrop Grumman Chair in Electromagnetics in recognition of his outstanding and diversifi ed research contributions in the areas of electromagnetics and antennas. He is a well-known international authority in his field and heads the UCLA EE Department Antenna Research, Analysis and Measurement (ARAM) Laboratory. Dr. Rahmat-Samii has authored and co-authored over 720 technical journal articles and conference papers and has written 25 book chapters and three books. He has received numerous awards, including the 2007 Chen-To Tai Distinguished Educator Award of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society.

Prof. Rahmat-Samii's pioneering research activities cover many areas including: (a) Advanced Refl ector Antenna Designs and Compensations (in which antenna concepts and designs are utilized in many planetary space missions, soil moisture remote sensing instruments, direct broadcast satellites, and outer space missions); (b) Personal Communication Antennas including Human Interactions (ARAM is considered one of the prominent research groups in the area of communication antennas for mobile units, MIMO, wearable and implanted applications. It is among the pioneering groups to include the effects of the human biological tissues in simulation models); (c) Nature-Based Optimization Techniques in Electromagnetics (Prof. Rahmat-Samii pioneered activities in the application of the genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimizations in electromagnetics and antenna research. Many innovative and multifunction communication antennas, radar absorbing structures, and antenna array topologies have been designed using these techniques); (d) Antenna Measurements and Diagnostics Techniques (Advanced measurements and diagnostic techniques for antenna characterization have been developed). For the first time ever, the indoor bi-polar near field measurement technique has been demonstrated. A microwave holography technique for antenna diagnostics including phaseless measurements has also been developed.

Kang Wang
Raytheon Chair in Physical Sciences
Professor

Professor Kang L. Wang, recently appointed as the Raytheon Chair Professor of Physical Science, received his BS (1964) degree from National Cheng Kung University and his MS (1966) and PhD (1970) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is recognized internationally as a leader in nanotechnology. He serves on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (American Scientifi c publishers).

He also currently serves as the Director of the MARCO Focus Center on Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics (FENA), an interdisciplinary Research Center funded by the Semiconductor Industry Association and Department of Defense to address the need of information processing technology beyond scaled CMOS, and was named the Director of Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN) — a coordinated multi-project Research Institute. WIN is funded by NRI, Intel and the State of California Current ongoing projects are aimed at spintronics for low power applications. Prof. Wang was also the founding director of the Nanoelectronics Research Facility at UCLA (established in 1989) with an infrastructure to further research in nanotechnology. In addition to these technical leadership contributions, he has provided academic leadership in engineering education. He was the Dean of Engineering from 2000 to 2002 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prof. Wang's research includes nanoelectronics, spintronics and new architectures for nanodevices.

Eli Yablonovitch
Northrop Grumman Chair in Optoelectronics
Adjunct Professor

Professor Eli Yablonovitch, a pioneer in the field of opto-electronics and photonic bandgap research, is the Northrop Grumman Chair in Optoelectronics. He also heads the UCLA EE Department Optoelectronics Group, which is focused on the future of electronics and optoelectronics. Among the technological changes that will be forthcoming in the near future are:

• The full integration of optics and electronics in silicon chips. This is being accomplished in part by the incorporation of two-dimensional photonic crystal concepts into silicon design. An example of a three dimensional photonic crystal is in the fi gure at right, which is the electromagnetic analog of a conventional crystal for electrons.
• New paradigms for very-short-distance intra-chip communications will have to be developed before we can create nano-electronics. Current signaling schemes consume too many joules per bit, dissipating the advantage of going to the nanoscale. A new short distance communications paradigm must emerge, so that the energy effi ciency of nano-storage and nanologic will be matched by equally effi cient communications.
• After the culmination of the current semiconductor road map, quantum information processing will emerge as the dominant information processing technology of the 21st century. It is currently unclear which quantum information technology will emerge as dominant, but the Yablonovitch group is emphasizing semiconductor hosts for the qubits.