Ohio State ECE in 2020: Innovation and inspiration
Even in the wake of a tragic worldwide pandemic, The Ohio State University’s electrical and computer engineering students and faculty continued to reveal their stories of inspiration and innovation in 2020.
It was a year marked with firsts – to put it mildly. However, the community proved its character in and outside the classroom. Here are the Top 10 most-read stories of the year, based upon link tracking:
No. 1 MOST-READ STORY OF 2020: One of the last research photo sessions I was able to conduct before the pandemic was to honor Presidential Fellow Shahadat Hasan Sohel for his research, “High Linearity Power Amplifiers for Next Generation Communication Systems,” as advised by ECE Professor Siddharth Rajan: https://go.osu.edu/sohel-fellow
No. 2: The concept of crowds may have changed in 2020, but the innovation remains. This year, graduate student Xingyu Zhou became the first to resolve a decades-old data queue theory: https://go.osu.edu/queuetheory
No. 3: After graduating at the top of their high school class in Toledo, twins Deontre and Deontae Wright could have let the pandemic and systemic racism get the better of them – or at least slow them up. Instead, they doubled down on their life goals and passion to create a better world: https://go.osu.edu/wrightpathece
No. 4: Ramy Tantawy became the co-founder and CEO of SenseICs as a Ph.D. candidate at the ElectroScience Laboratory with ECE Professor Waleed Khalil's Circuit Laboratory for Advanced Sensors and Systems (C.L.A.S.S.) group. He earned a $1 million funding boost for his business, while earning his PhD: https://go.osu.edu/senseics-ramy
No. 5: The tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of police brutality proved a societal breaking point in 2020. ECE students, faculty and staff gathered together in support of overcoming systemic racism. Departments across the entire Ohio State College of Engineering joined in. https://go.osu.edu/ecelightvigil-story
No. 6: Collaboration with faculty across the world, an impressive array of successful alumni, groundbreaking research, and a reputation for collegiality helped boost Ohio State ECE rankings in 2020, as the program reached top 25 status in the 2021 US News and World Report: https://go.osu.edu/eceranking
No. 7: For the first time in ECE program history, a record three students were announced among the winners of the distinguished 2020 Graduate School Presidential Fellowship at The Ohio State University: Daniel Lepkowski, Kaiyi Ji and Towhidur Razzak. Story: https://go.osu.edu/2020prez
No. 8: In the realm where physics and engineering collide, ECE Assistant Professor Shamsul Arafin earned the National Science Foundation EAGER funding to help advance the building blocks of quantum technologies. https://go.osu.edu/arafin-eager
No. 9: The Ohio State University is the newest home for the international Cybersecurity Canon, a curated collection of must-read books for the cybersecurity community. On Jan. 17, Ohio State’s Office of Research launched the new Institute for Cybersecurity and Digital Trust (ICDT), which now houses the canon: https://go.osu.edu/icdt-canon
No. 10: Ohio State joined a new initiative led by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to address the urgent need for engineering graduates in the United States specializing in microelectronics. The Scalable Asymmetric Lifecycle Engagement Microelectronics Workforce Development program (SCALE) is a $19.2 million multi-university public-private-academic partnership led by Purdue University. Its mission is to address the lack of engineering workforce development in the area of microelectronics across the nation. Story: https://go.osu.edu/microelectronics
Story by Ryan Horns | Communications Specialist | Horns.1@osu.edu | @OhioStateECE