IEEE Orlando Section Honors Eight Section Members at 2014 Awards Banquet

by Mike Orlovsky, 2014 IEEE Orlando Section Awards Chair

The awards program is an important activity in the IEEE. It provides the approach to recognize the efforts of members to improve our organization, and to bring merit to our profession. Section awards are presented to recognize deserving members of our local community. The Section each year forwards our award recipients names and citations upwards to the IEEE Florida Council, IEEE Region 3, and IEEE-USA Awards Programs. We also forward the award recipients to the Florida Engineering Society for consideration in their awards program that coincides with Engineers Week in February 2015. We encourage all members to nominate candidates for appropriate awards.

The Orlando Section awards six awards. OUTSTANDING SERVICE, OUTSTANDING ENGINEER, OUTSTANDING ENGINEERING EDUCATOR, and OUTSTANDING ENTREPRENEUR, and two parallel student awards for OUTSTANDING GRADUATE STUDENT and OUTSTANDING UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT. The Orlando Section also awards one year Graduate and Undergraduate Scholarships.

This year we will make three awards one each for OUTSTANDING ENGINEER, OUTSTANDING GRADUATE STUDENT and OUTSTANDING UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT.

Our first award is OUTSTANDING ENGINEER. This award recognizes superior professional and technical achievements within the IEEE and to the Engineering Profession.

The Outstanding Engineer is awarded to Christopher Geiger, a Systems Architect Senior Manager with Lockheed Martin. This award is in recognition of Chris's outstanding engineering leadership in the development and sustainment of military simulators and automated test systems and championing engineering involvement in public service. Nominator: Chester Kennedy, Lockheed Martin, Vice President

Our next award is OUTSTANDING GRADUATE STUDENT. This award recognizes graduate academic accomplishments in the area of studies, research, and professional contribution that benefits the engineering profession.

The Outstanding Graduate Student is awarded to Sihui He.
This award is in recognition of her outstanding achievement in developing novel liquid crystal biosensors for detecting liver diseases and her leadership in UCF IEEE and SPIE student chapters.
Nominator: Dr. Shin-Tson Wu
Sihui is completing her internship at Microsoft and colleague Fenglin Peng represented Sihui to receive the award.

Our next award is OUTSTANDING UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT. This award recognizes an Undergraduate Student member of IEEE Orlando Section who has distinguished themselves during their undergraduate career by outstanding academic performance, interest and dedication to the electrotechnology profession

The Outstanding Undergraduate Student is awarded to Victor Salomon. Victor has demonstrated great leadership skills through the revival of Eta Kappa Nu, in which he is the President, and Chair of the Industry Committee. He has achieved a high academic performance and used what he learned to teach others. He has been in the President’s Roll one time and in three different occasions in the Dean’s Roll at UCF. Nominator: Chris Nergard

The Orlando Section presents Undergraduate / Graduate Scholarship Awards each calendar year to student members in good standing, currently enrolled as undergraduate / graduate student in an engineering program located in Orlando Section's 5 county (central Florida) area as well as at time of the award. Successful candidates show strong potential for significant impact in the academic and engineering profession as a thought leader, developer of ground breaking research, or creator of revolutionary technology.

We will award five Graduate Student Scholarships this year. Each recipient receives a $1000 check for use in the academic pursuits.

Arup Ghosh
Graduate Student Scholarship Award
Nominator: Dr. Kalpathy B. Sundaram
Arup has not only been a leader to the IEEE student chapter and other organizations (FISH, ISA, ACM SIGBio), in Spring 2013 and Summer 2013 semester he taught two classes over 200 students and benefited the students as well as the University. He has proven his success with University by exemplary academics and with an excellent professional quality. In 2012, Upsilon Pi Epsilon honor society recognized his achievement by giving him a lifetime membership and a certificate. He won the IEEE Orlando Section graduate scholarship award 2012 and 2013.

Zhixin Wang
Graduate Student Scholarship Award
Nominator: Dr. Juin J. Liou
Mr. Wang has an outstanding academic record, as evidenced by his excellent GPA (4.0) and publication record including 7 journal and conference paper published, and 1 journal paper submitted and under reviewed. Furthermore, Mr. Wang was an inventor on a patent filed in Jan. 2014. Mr. Wang has been working on two USA semiconductor industrial projects and two joint Taiwan-USA projects on the development of advanced low/high voltage electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection solutions for devices and circuits in emerging micro/nano Si and GaN technologies.
Mr. Wang has also been very active in engaging in the professional services, as he has severed as the Chair and Treasurer of the IEEE Electron Device Society (EDS) Orlando Chapter since 2012, and contributed in the organization of the 2012 and 2014 IEEE EDS Mini-Colloquium, numerous seminars and IEEE distinguished lectures held in Orlando. In the summers of 2011 and 2012, he was an intern at Intersil Corp. and Micron Corp. working in the fields of ESD and reliability for advanced BCD and DRAM technologies.

Sihui He
Graduate Student Scholarship Award
Nominator: Dr. Shin-Tson Wu
Sihui’s research is focusing on the molecular engineering of the surface of liquid crystal films for biosensor applications. This is a challenging project which involves rather complex interaction processes between liquid crystals and biological molecules at interfaces. She has worked out the underlying molecular mechanism of the processes and fabricated liquid crystal biosensors which have been successfully used for the sensitive detection of the clinical biomarker of liver disease in urine from individuals.
Sihui is also actively involved in SPIE and IEEE Student Chapter. Currently, she is President of SPIE Student Chapter at UCF. She organized a symposium on the medical application of optics this year. Sihui is completing her internship at Microsoft and colleague Fenglin Peng represented Sihui to receive the award.

Tianjiao Li
Graduate Student Scholarship Award
Nominator: Dr. Kalpathy B. Sundaram
Tianjiao started on an NSF-sponsored project which focuses on the integration of cavity filters and antennas. By quickly grasping the research results from other members in the group, Tianjiao significantly extended this research field by realizing a tunable evanescent-mode filter/antenna, which appears to be the first demonstration of a filter/antenna system with frequency tunability. The outstanding work was presented in 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC-URSI National Radio Science Meeting (IEEE AP-S/URSI) and won her the Honorable Mention Award in the student paper competition. Tianjiao currently serves as Vice Chair of the IEEE Orlando AP/MTT joint chapter. On behalf of the Orlando Chapter, she attended the MTT-S Chapter Chairs Meeting in 2013 IMS held at Seattle, Washington in June 2013. She is webmaster for the IEEE Orlando AP/MTT chapter and also helps on the logistics for chapter seminars. Tianjiao has been very active as a student volunteer in many IEEE conferences including 2012, 2013, and 2014 IEEE Wireless and Microwave Technology Conference (WAMICON), 2013 IEEE AP-S/URSI, and IEEE IMS in 2012 and 2014.

Zhenyue Luo
Graduate Student Scholarship Award
Nominator: Dr. Shin-Tson Wu
During his PhD candidacy exam and proposal exam. he impressed the committees by his level of understanding in his research topic: “High efficiency and wide color gamut liquid crystal displays”. He has proposed a polarization preserving light guide plate to enhance the LCD efficiency by 40%, and an algorithm to enhance the LCD color gamut by 50% with emerging quantum dot techniques. Mr. Luo has been very productive in his research area. He has published fifteen journal publications and eleven conference proceedings, including two invited talks.
Zhenyue has been actively involved in the UCF student chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society. He served as Vice President (2012-2013) and as President (2013-2014). Zhenyue is completing his internship in California and colleague Ruidong Zhu represented Zhenyue to receive the award.

We also recognize the awards review and scholarship review committees. As usual during the awards and scholarship nominating process, this year's committees had before them a much larger number of qualified candidates than there were available awards and scholarships. This is a terrific sign of active professional and academic communities but it is also a situation that inevitably results in the committee’s inability to select many great candidates. We wish the candidates not selected for awards this year continued success in their research, academic, and professional careers.

We thank the student award and scholarship committee of Chris Geiger, Deb Hall, Ravi Rajaravivarma, Lynn Guthrie, and Donghui Wu for their time and professional investment. We also thank the professional award committee of Stan Buchanan, Scott Clary, and Jorge Medina for their dedicated work.

Michael C. Orlovsky, SM-IEEE
Junior Past Chair, IEEE Orlando Section
2014 Awards Chair, IEEE Orlando Section
Chapter Chair, AESS Orlando Section
Region 3 Representative, IEEE-USA Committee on Transportation and Aerospace Policy
410.979.0476 (Cell)
407.909.0956 (Home)
mcorlovsky@ieee.org

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