Faculty Highlight: Professors M. C. Frank Chang and Yahya Rahmat-Samii

UCLA Electrical Engineering Professors M. C. Frank Chang and Yahya Rahmat-Samii have been elected into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the highest professional distinction accorded to an American engineer. Professor Chang was honored for the development and commercialization of GaAs power amplifiers and integrated circuits, and Professor Rahmat-Samii was honored for his contributions to the design and measurement of reflector and handheld-device antennas. They are both now among a select 2,227 academy members nationwide, along with 194 foreign associates.

Professor M. C. Frank Chang

Professor Mau-Chung Frank Chang received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan, in 1979. He is Professor and Director of the High Speed Electronics Laboratory at UCLA Electrical Engineering. Before joining UCLA, he was the Assistant Director of the High Speed Electronics Laboratory at the Rockwell Science Center (1983-1997), Thousand Oaks, California. During that period of time, he developed and transferred the AlGaAs/GaAs HBT technology from the research laboratory to the production line (Conexant Systems). The HBT production has now grown into a multi-billion dollar business worldwide. His research group has demonstrated the world's first source synchronous CDMA bus interface with reconfigurable multichip access capability. He also led the first demonstration of a 2Gsps 6bit ADC in CMOS, a 1Gsps 11bit THA in SiGe and a dual mode (CDMA/AMPS) power amplifier in SiGe for wireless handset applications. He was named an IEEE Fellow in 1996 for his contributions in ultra-high speed HBT integrated circuit development, and was honored with the IEEE David Sarnoff Award in 2006.

Professor Yahya Rahmat-Samii

Professor Rahmat-Samii received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining UCLA in 1989, he was a Senior Research Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He served as Chair of UCLA's Electrical Engineering Department from April 2000 through June 2005. Since 2007, he has been the holder of the Northrop Grumman Chair in Electromagnetics at UCLA. Prof. Rahmat-Samii has had pioneering research contributions in diverse areas of electromagnetics, antennas, measurement and diagnostics techniques, numerical and asymptotic methods, satellite and personal communications, antennas for remote sensing and astronomical applications, human/antenna interactions, frequency selective surfaces, electromagnetic and photonic band gap structures and the applications of the genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization.


List of current NAE or NAS members in the department.