Personality Profile

After profiling a series of male EMC engineers domiciled in the northern region of Europe, I dedicate the current personality profile to Francesca Maradei.
As did many of my fellow colleagues, I spent Wednesday evening of the Hawaii symposium week attending the world famous luau at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. As part of the program, we enjoyed the performance of traditional Hawaiian dancers. At the end of the evening’s entertainment, several attendees were invited to join the Hawaiian dancers on stage for a dance. One of them was Francesca Maradei, a member of the EMC Society Board of Directors and an Associate Professor at La Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. To everyone’s surprise, Francesca behaved on stage like a professional dancer!
Francesca started her career as a student of electrical engineering at La Sapienza University in 1987. After having received her “Laurea” Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1992, she spent one year in France at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, Laboratoire d’Electrotechnique de Grenoble (INPG-LEG), where she received a Diplome d’Etudes Approfondies (DEA) in Electrical Engineering. In July 1997, she was awarded a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering by La Sapienza University.

Francesca is shown during her last ballet performance in the role of the Lilac Fairy from Sleeping Beauty.

Francesca joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at La Sapienza University in 1996 where, before becoming an Associate Professor, she served as an Assistant Professor until 2000. Francesca started her research activity in 1993 working with Professor Mauro Feliziani and the active EMC group in Rome led by Professor Marcello D’Amore. She is the author of more than 100 papers in the field of numerical techniques and their application to EMC problems. Her research is mainly focused on the development of original finite element and finite difference models, numerical modeling of thin penetrable shields, numerical modeling of dispersive materials, analysis of coupled problems involving electrical circuits and electromagnetic fields, EMC in multiconductor transmission lines, techniques to extract Spice-like circuits, signal integrity, ESD, numerical solution of field-excited non-uniform transmission lines and radiated emission from railway traction lines. Her most relevant contributions are the explicit solution of partial differential equations by the finite element method and the impedance network boundary conditions to model penetrable thin shields in finite difference and finite element methods.

An avid scuba diver, Francesca prepares to jump into the beautiful Pacific Ocean.

She was awarded the 2003 James Melcher Prize Paper Award by the Electrostatic Committee of the IEEE Industry Applications Society, the Oral Presentation Best Paper Award at the International Symposium EMC’94 Roma, and the Poster Presentation Best Paper Award at the International Symposium EMC Europe 2000.
Francesca has been actively involved in several conferences. She was a member of the Technical Program Committee for the IEEE Conference on Electromagnetic Field Computation (CEFC’2006), in Miami, USA, 2006, and a member of the organizing committees for the following international conferences: 2007 IEEE International Symposium on EMC, EMC Europe 2002, EMC’98 Roma, EMC’96 Roma and EMC’94 Roma. She is also a member of the International Technical Committee for the EUROEM 2008 Symposium, in Lausanne, Switzerland, July 21-25. Francesca has been a member of the Editorial Board for the IEEE Biennial Conference on Electromagnetic Field Computation (CEFC) since 1998, and of the Conference on the Computation of Electromagnetic Fields (COMPUMAG) since 2001.
Since 1993, Francesca has been teaching courses on Principles of Electrical Engineering, EMC, and Numerical Procedures for Solving EMC Problems. From 1997 to 2000, she was a lecturer for the Erasmus Intensive Course on EMC supported by the ERASMUS ICP 1054/B/06 and addressed to Ph.D. students.
Francesca is very active within the EMC Society. Currently she is completing her first term as a member of the Board of Directors and serves as Chapter Coordinator. She served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on EMC from 1999 to 2000. She is a member of the IEEE EMC Society Technical Committee on Computational Electromagnetics and for the past several years, she has served as a technical paper reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility, Industry Applications, Microwave Theory and Techniques, and Magnetics.
On the personal side, Francesca has been involved in ballet classes since she was six years old. In 1985, she received certification to teach ballet and dance professionally, but two years later decided to pursue an engineering degree instead. Francesca is also a PADI dive master scuba diver and she loves scuba diving in tropical areas of the world. In her leisure time, she enjoys reading books, watching movies, playing tennis, and taking care of her garden. EMC