Awards & Recognition

National Recognition and Professional Leadership

• Member, National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee (U.S. Department of Energy/White House Office of Science & Technology Policy)—Jungsang Kim and Christopher Monroe
• 2021 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) ECE Distinguished Educator Award—Lisa G. Huettel

Early Career Awards

• IBM Global University Program Academic Award—Tingjun Chen
• Army Research Office Young Investigator Award—Neil Gong
• NSF CAREER Award—Maria Gorlatova
• NSF CAREER Award—Iman Marvian
• Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship—Boyla Mainsah
• NSF CAREER Award—Lisa Wu Wills
• American Chemical Society (ACS) Photonics Young Investigator Award Lectureship—Maiken Mikkelsen

Professional Society Recognition

• Fellow, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics—Robert Calderbank
• Vitold Belevitch Award—Krishnendu Chakrabarty
• Mid-Career Award, IEEE Technical Committee on Cyber-Physical Systems—Yiran Chen
• Fellow, Optical Society—Sina Farsiu
• 2021 ASEE Southeast Section Outstanding Teaching Award—Lisa G. Huettel
• Outstanding Leadership Award, IEEE Technical Committee on Secure and Dependable Measurement—Hai Li
• IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) Distinguished Research Award for 2020—Hai Li
• Fellow, Optical Society—Chris Monroe
• IEEE Reliability Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award—Kishor Trivedi

National Recognition and Professional Leadership

• Senior Member, National Academy of Inventors—Krishnendu Chakrabarty
• Italia Award, Aspen Institute—Natasha Litchinitser

Professional Society Recognition

• Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Sina Farsiu
• Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Jeffrey Krolik
• Fellow, Institute of Mathematical Statistics—Cynthia Rudin
• Fellow, The Optical Society of America—Michael Gehm
• Distinguished Member, Association of Computing Machinery—Benjamin C. Lee
• Morton Antler Lecturer, IEEE Holm Conference on Electrical Contacts—Mary “Missy” Cummings
• Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine (CAS-M)—Yiran Chen
• Prolific Author Award, Asia and South Pacific Automation Conference (ASD-DAC)—Yiran Chen
• Alan O. Plait Award for Tutorial Excellence, 2021 Reliability & Maintainability Symposium (RAMS)—Kishor Trivedi
• Best Research Artifact Award, IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN)—Maria Gorlatova

Fellowships

• Moore Inventor Fellowship, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation—Maiken Mikkelsen
• Faculty Fellow in Israel, Jewish National Fund—Xiling Shen

University Awards and Honors

• Undergraduate Mentor of the Year, Mary Lou Williams Center, Duke University—Shani Daily
• Stansell Family Distinguished Research Award, Pratt School of Engineering—Ken Brown
• Capers & Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Teaching & Research, Pratt School—Aaron Franklin

News Media Recognition

• Highly Cited Researchers, ISI-Web of Science—Willie Padilla, Guillermo Sapiro and David Smith

National Academy of Engineering Membership

• Vahid Tarokh

National Research and Professional Leadership Awards

• Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science—Krishnendu Chakrabarty
• North American Laureate-International Award for Women in Science, UNESCO & L’Oreal—Ingrid Daubechies

Professional Society Recognition

• Fellow, American Physical Society—Willie Padilla and Ken Brown
• Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)—Hai “Helen” Li
• IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award—Lisa G. Huettel
• IEEE Bob Madge Innovation Award—Krishnendu Chakrabarty
• Distinguished Member, Association for Computing Machinery—Yiran Chen

Early Career Awards

• Early Career Award, Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems—Miroslav Pajic

University and School Honors

• Bass Connection Professor (Duke University)—Stacy Tantum and Vahid Tarokh
• Distinguished Alumni Award (University of Illinois Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering)—Qing Ho Liu
• Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award (Fudan University and Zhongzhi Enterprise Group)—Ingrid Daubechies

Media Recognition

• Top 1% of Highly Cited Researchers, Clarivate Analytics—Steven Cummer and David Smith

National Research and Professional Leadership Awards

• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (United States of America)—Guillermo Sapiro
• Invitational Fellowship (Short-term S: Nobel Prize Level), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Japan)—Krishnendu Chakrabarty
• Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (Germany)—Yiran Chen

Professional Society Recognition

• Fellow, The Optical Society (OSA)—Jungsang Kim
• Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)—Yiran Chen
• Trustee, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics—Missy Cummings
• Inductee, IEEE Computer Society’s High Performance Computer Architecture Hall of Fame—Benjamin Lee
• Aerodynamics Award, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics—Kenneth C. Hall
• Technical Achievement Award, Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society—Qing Liu
• Computational Electromagnetics Award, Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society—Qing Liu
• Outstanding Member of the Editorial Board Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society—Sina Farsiu
• Distinguished Member, Association for Computing Machinery—Hai “Helen” Li
• At-Large Member, IEEE Education Society Board of Governors—Lisa Huettel
• Scientific Advisory Panel Member, Fields Institute (Canada)—Vahid Tarokh

Early Career Awards

• National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award—Galen Reeves
• Kalvi Fellow, National Academy of Sciences and the Kalvi Foundation—Guglielmo Scovazzi
• Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, American Physical Society—Maiken Mikkelsen

University and School Honors

• William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics (City University of Hong Kong)—Ingrid Daubechies
• Honorary Professor, Xidian University (China)—Krishnendu Chakrabarty
• Member, Bass Society of Fellows (Duke University)—Aaron Franklin and Michail Zavlanos
• Capers & Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Teaching & Research (Duke University Pratt School of Engineering)—Warren Grill
• Stansell Family Distinguished Research Award (Duke University Pratt School of Engineering)—Steve Cummer
• Dean’s Award for Leadership in Program & Operational Excellence (Duke University Pratt School of Engineering)—Amy Kostrewa

Media Recognition

• Top 1% of Highly Cited Researchers (Clarivate Analytics, formerly Thomson Reuters)—David Smith

National Academy of Engineering Membership

• Elected in 2017 – Blake Wilson

National Research and Professional Leadership Awards

• Member, National Academy of Inventors – David Smith
• Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal, Acoustical Society of America – Blake Wilson
• ARVO Foundation/Pfizer Ophthalmics Carl Camras Translational Research Award – Sina Farsiu
• Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society – Krishnendu Chakrabarty
• Cultural Diversity Award, International Meeting for Autism Research – Guillermo Sapiro

Professional Society Recognition

• Fellow, Acoustical Society of America – Blake Wilson
• Fellow, American Geophysical Union – Steve Cummer
• Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) – Xin Li

Early Career Awards

• NSF CAREER Award – Miroslav Pajic
• Analytic Chemistry 2017 Young Innovator Award – Tony Jun Huang
• Beckman Young Investigator, Beckman Foundation – Yiyang Gong
• Bessel Prize, Humboldt Foundation – Stefano Curtarolo
• SPIE Early Career Achievement Award – Maiken Mikkelsen
• Sloan Research Fellowship, Sloan Foundation – Yiyang Gong
• Vallee Young Investigator, Vallee Foundation – Yiyang Gong
• Young Investigator Award, Army Research Office – Maiken Mikkelsen
• Young Investigator Award, Office of Naval Research – Maiken Mikkelsen and Miroslav Pajic

University and School Honors

• Stansell Family Distinguished Teaching Award (Pratt School) – Guillermo Sapiro
• Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (University of Edinburgh) – Dan Sorin
• Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Scottish Informatics & Computer Science Alliance (University of Edinburgh) – Dan Sorin

Media Recognition

• “Top 100 Discoveries of 2016,” Discover Magazine – Xiling Shen
• Top 1% of Highly Cited Researchers (Clarivate Analytics, formerly Thomson Reuters) – David Smith and Ingrid Daubechies
• Highly Cited Computer Vision Researchers (AMiner.org) – Guillermo Sapiro, Landon Cox, and Bruce Maggs
• Highly Cited Computer Science and Engineering Researchers (Guide2Research.com) – Kishor Trivedi and Guillermo Sapiro

National Research and Professional Leadership Awards

• Bessel Research Award, Humboldt Foundation – Stefano Curtarolo
• 2016 Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke – Warren Grill
• 2016 Technology Award, Eduard Rhein Foundation – Blake Wilson

Professional Society Recognition

• Hans Fischer Senior Research Fellow, Technical University of Munich – Krishnendu Chakrabarty
• IEEE Transactions on CAD Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award – Krishnendu Chakrabarty
• William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award – Krishnendu Chakrabarty
• Senior area editor, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing – Sina Farsiu
• Pascal Rol Award for Best Paper in Ophthalmic Technologies at the SPIE Photonics West 2015 – Sina Farsiu
• Best paper award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society International Conference on Humanoid Robots – Kris Hauser
• Fellow, Optical Society of America – Qing Huo Liu
• Associate Editor in Chief, IEEE Micro – Dan Sorin

Early Career Awards

• 2016 Cottrell Scholar, Research Corporation for Science Advancement – Maiken Mikkelsen

University and School Honors

• Faculty Director, B.N. Duke Scholarship Program (Duke University) – Mike Gustafson
• Teamwork Award (Duke University) – Guillermo Sapiro & colleagues
• Julian Abele Graduate Mentor Award (Duke University) – Adrienne Stiff-Roberts
• Stansell Family Distinguished Research Award (Pratt School) – Jungsang Kim
• Office of Naval Research Faculty Fellow – Kishor Trivedi
• Honorary doctorate in medicine, University of Salamanca (Spain) – Blake Wilson

Distinguished Lectureships and Speakerships

• IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2014-2016 – Qing Huo Liu
• Keynote speech, Predictive Multiscale Materials Modeling conference (Cambridge University) – Stefano Curtarolo
• Invited talk, 5th Annual Karles Invitational Conference on Neuroelectronics – Warren Grill
• Keynote lecture, 2016 Medical and Scientific Advisory Council Meeting, Dystonia Medical Research Foundation – Warren Grill

Media Recognition

• “20 Engineering Management Professors You Should Know,” Online Engineering Programs – Jeff Glass
• Top 1% of Highly Cited Researchers, Thomson Reuters – Ingrid Daubechies and David Smith
• Top Picks from Computer Architecture Conferences, IEEE Micro 2015 – Benjamin Lee
• Selected for highlight, SPIE Women in Optics – Maiken Mikkelsen

National Academy of Engineering Membership

• Elected in 2015 – Ingrid Daubechies

Research and Professional Leadership Awards

• National Academy of Engineering Russ Prize – Blake S. Wilson
• Claude E. Shannon Award, IEEE Information Theory Society – Robert Calderbank

Professional Society Recognition

• Fellow, National Academy of Inventors – Robert Calderbank
• Fellow, IACM – John Board
• Elected Secretary, USACM – John Board
• Member, Advisory Board of DOE ASCAC – John Board
• Fellow, National Security Science and Engineering, US Department of Defense – Chris Dwyer
• Fellow, NAE Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium – Lisa Huettel
• Life Fellow, IEEE – Hisham Massoud
• Fellow, IEEE – Guillermo Sapiro and Blake S. Wilson
• At-Large Member, Board of Governors, IEEE Education Society – Lisa Huettel
• Fellow, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science – Kishor Trivedi
• IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award – Krishnendu Chakrabarty
• Best Poster Award, Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association – Lisa Huettel
• Research selected as IEEE Micro Top Pick of 2014 – Ben Lee

Early Career Awards

• National Science Foundation CAREER Award –Maiken Mikkelsen
• AFOSR Young Investigator Research Award – Maiken Mikkelsen
• Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, Oak Ridge Associated Universities – Maiken Mikkelsen

University and School Honors

• Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award (Duke University) – Warren Grill
• Elected Chair, Academic Council (Duke University) – Nan Jokerst
• Stansell Family Distinguished Teaching Award (Pratt School) – Jeffrey Glass
• Klein Family Distinguished Teaching Award – Andrew Hilton
• Honorary Doctorate, Uppsala University (Sweden) – Blake S. Wilson

Distinguished Lectureships and Speakerships

• Israel Pollack Distinguished Lecturer, Technion-Israel Institute of Techology (Israel) – Guillermo Sapiro
• IEEE Information Theory Society Distinguished Lecturer – Henry Pfister
• NordSecMobile Scholar (Norway) – Kishor Trivedi
• Keynote Speaker, AIMBE Annual Meeting 2015 – Warren Grill
• Keynote Speaker, 3rd Annual Deep Brain Stimulation Think – Warren Grill
• Plenary Lecturer, 7th International IEEE EMBS Neural Engineering Conference – Warren Grill
• Plenary Speaker, European Signal Processing Conference – Guillermo Sapiro

Technology and Research Leadership

• Named US Army Chief Scientific Leader for Extramural Engineering Research Enterprise – April Brown
• Named Program Manager, DARPA – Jeff Krolik
• Member, Editorial Board of Computational Mechanics – John Board

Qitong Gao

Qitong stands out as one of the most exceptional PhD students I’ve had the privilege of working with.  His groundbreaking contributions to automated decision-making in healthcare demonstrate not only a profound grasp of machine learning theory but also an extraordinary talent for translating these concepts into impactful real-world solutions.  Qitong is the 1st student I have seen throughout my academic career who has demonstrated algorithmic frameworks that transcend traditional domain boundaries while delivering tangible improvements in healthcare applications, e.g., improving the current deep brain stimulation therapy for treating Parkinson’s disease with practical outcomes justified in clinics with real Parkinson’s partients.  Qitong’s work represents a rare combination of academic excellence, practical innovation, and collaborative leadership.  His achievements not only advance our understanding of automated decision-making but also hold the potential to transform healthcare delivery for the better.

Jessica Centers

Jessica’s dissertation, entitled “Applied Millimeter Wave Radar Vibrometry,” is a groundbreaking work that pushes the boundaries of millimeter‐wave radar technology in its applications in wireless communications and non‐acoustic human speech analysis.  One of the most compelling aspects of Jessica’s dissertation is the development of a completely new form of wireless communications called Vibrational Radar Backscatter Communications (VRBC).  This approach allows mmW radars, such as those in most automotive advanced driver assistance systems, to receive messages encoded in the vibration of transponding surfaces.  Her results and analyses position VRBC as a desirable solution in spaces like X2V, offering unique benefits over commonly considered higher rate solutions such as direct short‐range communications (DSRC) which face challenges related to spectrum allocation, interference, security, and infrastructure cost.

Ang Li

Ang’s dissertation, titled “Enable Intelligence on Billion Devices with Deep Learning”, stands out as a testament to his exceptional research abilities and commitment to the field of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  His dissertation focuses on the development of large-scale networked and trustworthy edge intelligent systems, aimed at addressing practical challenges in a collaborative, scalable, secure, and ubiquitous manner. His research has directly contributed to numerous advancements in the fields of edge computing, federated learning, privacy, and security.  For example, his design of revolutionary secure, computation and communication-efficient federated learning frameworks have served as the foundation for other independent research studies, and also became the state-of-the-art method in this field. In addition, Dr. Ang Li also introduced the groundbreaking privacy-respecting data crowdsourcing framework for deep learning, as well as privacy-preserving techniques for online machine learning services.

Zhongxi Li

As his main research topic, Zhongxi worked on medical device technology, specifically technology to noninvasively activate neurons in the brain. Instead of incrementally following the trends in the field and pushing the boundaries, he designed quite radical techniques to bypass the problem of limited focality of electromagnetic fields in the low-frequency range where neurons are susceptible. He developed an understanding and the necessary technology to use the type-specific activation dynamics of neurons to shift the balance of activation between neuron populations in the focus. That step, however, required the development of fundamentally different high-power electronic circuit concepts since conventional power electronics considered the problem of generating an arbitrary high-bandwidth output at high power as not solvable with existing circuits and semiconductors. This concept has now already been taken up by various other groups and several companies evaluate its commercialization.

Furthermore, Zhongxi developed a strong affection for energy and power topics, which he initially only pursued as his unrelated personal interest. He designed a novel concept to turn conventional hard-wired batteries into dynamically reconfigurable systems using only relatively low-cost low-voltage electronics to reach high power levels. Such reconfigurable batteries can for the first time solve the major problem of the large manufacturing tolerances of battery cells. In conventional batteries, the weakest cell determines the overall battery performance with respect to power, capacity, aging, and terminal damage. Zhongxi’s reconfigurable battery circuits can rapidly change the series and parallel configuration of its subunits to control charge, power, aging potential, and heat, while even bypassing broken elements at little extra cost. As this limitation is gone in reconfigurable batteries, which can further dynamically adjust their output voltage and even generate AC, Zhongxi’s concepts have started a new research field. Leading companies from the automotive and large silicon-valley technology companies are currently taking up this idea.

In addition to the first two contributions, which have already left a likely long-lasting impression on research and our actual world as products using such technology emerge, several courses here at Duke inspired his interest for unbiased statistics and estimation theory. Instead of only studying existing methods and applying them as an amateur, he again was eager to bring his work to a professional level so that he could himself successfully make a contribution to the field. He designed an estimator for neural responses to brain stimulation, which has substantially higher sensitivity than any method known in the field, is unbiased, and even achieves maximum-likelihood properties. With that method, Zhongxi could further demonstrate that excitatory responses to brain stimulation happen already at very low stimulation amplitudes and that what was previously considered the stimulation threshold in noninvasive brain stimulation and used as dosage parameter for all related diagnostic and treatment applications, is rather in the middle of the dose response curve.

Linghao Song

In his PhD study, Linghao’s research focus is computer architecture and acceleration for deep learning and graph processing. He contributed to 29 publications on top venues including 1 ISCA, 4 HPCA, 5 DAC, 2 ICCAD, 5 DATE, 4 ASP-DAC and others. His Google Scholar profile records 885 citations and one of his works PipeLayer has been cited more than 300 times and is the most cited one among all papers in HPCA’17. He is also very active in serving the research community, including serving on the committee of 9 IEEE/ACM conferences and serving as a reviewer for 15 IEEE/ACM/Elsevier journals. He also mentored several female and undergraduate students in research and their works got accepted to top venues such as DAC, DATE. Linghao demonstrates diversified success of a Duke ECE PhD student.

Joseph Andrews

There are rare times when a PhD student manages to succeed in every possible area of dissertation-related work; such was the case for Joseph “Joey” Andrews. In his four years as a PhD student at Duke, Joey was able to invent a now-patented sensor technology that led to a funded startup company, publish multiple papers in high-profile journals, win the best paper award at a top conference in his field, be selected as an NIH fellow based on a research proposal that he wrote, mentor countless graduate and undergraduate students, and make numerous discoveries that continue to be transformative for ongoing research in the field.  His multitude of accomplishments made Joey an attractive candidate for faculty positions and he began as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a top engineering school, directly out of his PhD. Truly, Joey embodies that level of diversified success that we strive for in Duke ECE.

Junfei Li

By both objective and subjective metrics, Junfei brought a wide range of technical skills, from theory to experimental implementation, and technical fearlessness to his research. His research work as a PhD student resulted in a remarkable variety of notable publications in the field of acoustic metamaterials and wave propagation theory. That body of work has already had real impact and influence, and he received internal recognition through a John Chambers Scholar fellowship through Duke’s Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics. His most significant contributions were in the area of new paradigms for acoustic metamaterial design and in the development of tools to analyze and design them. His Google Scholar citation record (h=13, n=730 citations) demonstrates overall research impact that would be enviable for an assistant professor being considered for tenure, much less a PhD student less than one year from his defense. Junfei was an excellent student in all aspects of his PhD work at Duke; and the breadth, quality, volume, and impact of the research contained in his dissertation was very high.

Natalie Ann Rozman

Natalie is a perfect example of a student going above and beyond to give back to the Duke and ECE communities during her time in the program.  She has helped with countless recruitment events, organized student social events, and put in the place many of the organizational structures of the current graduate student leadership group, EASE (ECE Advocacy for Student Engagement).  She has spearheaded many events and programs that promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and community, some of which include ECHO (ECE College-High School Opportunity) and the Graduate Student Application Workshop.  These events show Natalie’s desire to provide support to prospective students in the community with a focus on underrepresented groups.  During her involvement with EASE, they were selected to receive the 2022 Dean’s Award for Inclusive Excellence in Graduate Education.  The ECE Advocacy for Student Engagement program was chosen from a highly competitive pool of nominees for its consistent and intentional creation of an environment that demonstrates and is dedicated to exemplary inclusiveness and diversity in graduate education and the broader community.  We are going to miss her terribly, but she can be assured that our department is only better because of her collaboration and support of our graduate students.

No award was given.  An additional Outstanding Dissertation Award was given as an alternative.

Huanrui Yang

During his Ph.D. study, Huanrui served as a TA for 5 semesters, including ECE 550D Fundamentals of Computer Systems and Engineering (Fall 2018), ECE 681 Pattern Classification and Recognition (Spring 2019), and ECE 590 / ECE 661 Computer Engineering Machine Learning and Deep Neural Nets (Fall 2019, Fall 2020 & Fall 2021). ECE 661 was a new course, first offered in Fall 2019. Huanrui contributed his expertise to the course’s design and served as the lead TA over subsequent semesters. The help from Huanrui was essential in making ECE 661 well-received by graduate and undergraduate students; the upcoming offering in Fall 2022 has more than 100 students enrolled. Huanrui is also leading the effort to draft a textbook for the course, which could have a broader impact on ECE education in the future.

Huanrui received top ratings and outstanding evaluation feedback from the students every semester that he TA’d. Moreover, multiple students expressed their intention of nominating Huanrui for a Departmental TA award, stating him to be “the best TA I have met in Duke ECE,” “dedicated, helpful and knowledgeable, very well deserved to be nominated,” and saying “he went above and beyond in TAing.” Besides teaching, Huanrui has mentored the research of multiple graduate and undergraduate students in the group.

Huanrui served as a reviewer for IEEE TNNLS, IEEE TCAD, Elsevier Computers & Security, Elsevier Neurocomputing, and multiple top conferences, including ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR, MLSys, and TinyML etc. He was selected to receive a NeurIPS 2021 Outstanding Reviewer Award given to the top 8% of reviewers.

Runren Zhang

Runren Zhang has shown outstanding service to the department. He served as a TA for 551 for four semesters and for 571 for one semester. He was always friendly and approachable with students and it was really valuable to the class to have a TA with such thorough expertise.

No award was given.