ECE Seminar Series

The seminar series explores cutting-edge research in all areas of ECE, facing the grand challenges of our time. It focuses on a wide range of topics in ECE, including microelectronics, photonics and unconventional computing (both quantum and non-quantum) in the post-Moore era, and the theory and applications of machine learning and AI. The series will feature some of the most promising and established researchers in the field, and provide a unique opportunity for participants to learn about the latest developments and engage in discussions with invited experts and ECE graduate students. Additionally, it will promote diversity by featuring a diverse range of speakers and perspectives, ensuring the broad accessibility of the latest ideas and breakthroughs.

Series Committee Members – Faculty: B.S. Manjunath (Chair), Kerem Çamsarı, Haewon Jeong, Jason Marden, John Schuller and Graduate Student Association: Anantajit Subrahmanya and Daniel Espinosa Gonzalez

Dr. Yulun Wang, Executive Chairman, Sovato Health

"Innovating Robotic Surgery and Telemedicine"

Wang's Talk – May 16 (Fri) @ 2:00 | Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001

Dr. Wang is Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Sovato Health, which is working to enable broad- based tele-surgery, and is Co-founder and Chairman of World Telehealth Initiative, a non-profit that uses volunteer clinicians and telemedicine to deliver sustained healthcare expertise to impoverished areas of the world. He is also a Fellow at Teladoc Health (NYSE: TDOC) where he contributes to various R&D initiatives, and the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility efforts. Wang founded InTouch Health in 2003, and served as Chairman and CEO until 2016, when he assumed the position of Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer. InTouch Health was acquired by Teladoc Health in July, 2020, for $1.1 billion.... (more)

Berinder Brar, President, Teledyne Scientific Company

"Compound Semiconductor Research and Development at Teledyne Scientific Company"

Brar's Talk – April 18 (Fri) @ 10:30am | Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001

Berinder “Bobby” Brar received his Ph.D in Electrical Engineering at UCSB in 1995, conducting research on the lnAs/AISb/GaSb semiconductor materials for high-speed electronic and optoelectronic applications. After completing his graduate work, he joined the Nanoelectronics branch in the Central Research Labs at Texas Instruments and worked on lnP- and Si-based resonant tunneling devices and field effect transistors for high-speed mixed-signal applications. Dr. Brar joined the Teledyne Scientific Company (TSC) in 1999 to manage the Advanced III-V Devices and Materials department. Dr. Brar is presently the President of TSC, a technology leader in high performance compound semiconductor devices and integrated circuits, and high-performance imaging systems for military, space, astronomy, and commercial applications... (more)

Mark Stiles, NIST Fellow, National Institute of Standards and Technology

"Can Spintronics Help Make Computing More Efficient?"

Stiles Talk – Mar 3 (Mon) @ 2:00pm | Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001

Mark Stiles is a NIST Fellow in the Alternative Computing Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He received a M.S./B.S. in Physics from Yale University, and a Ph.D. degree in Physics from Cornell University. Following postdoctoral research at AT&T Bell Laboratories, he joined the research staff at NIST. Mark's research has focused on the development of a variety of theoretical methods for predicting the properties of magnetic nanostructures and has recently shifted to studying alternative computing using novel hardware. Mark is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and IEEE... (more)

Ashok Veeraraghavan, Chair, ECE, Rice University

"Optics, Sensors and AI: Synergic Computational Imaging to go Beyond the Limits Imposed by Conventional Imaging"

Veeraraghavan's Talk – February 7 (Fri) @ 2:00pm | Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001

Ashok Veeraraghavan serves as the current Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. He also directs the computational imaging lab, which focuses on solving hard and challenging problems in imaging and vision by co-designing sensors, optics, electronics, signal processing, and machine learning algorithms. Before joining Rice University, he spent three wonderful and fun-filled years as a Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge, MA. He received his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2002 and M.S and PhD. degrees from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2004 and 2008 respectively... (more)

Niels Volkmann, Professor, ECE, University of California, Santa Barbara

"From Pixels to Life: Decoding Cellular Worlds with Cryogenic Electron Microscopy"

Volkmann's Talk – December 6 (Fri) @ 2:00pm | Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001

Niels Volkmann was educated at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and obtained his PhD at the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg with Ada Yonath, who won the Nobel Prize in 2009. Dr. Volkmann completed training as a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University with David DeRosier, one of the founding fathers of three-dimensional image reconstruction techniques.

Dr. Volkmann's research focuses on the development and application of innovative new computational, artificial intelligence, and data science tools to bridge information between the atomic and cellular scales, covering more than six orders of magnitude from Ångstroms to tens of microns. (more...)

Dr. Raghuveer Rao, Chief, Intelligent Perception Branch, DEVCOM ARL

"The Army Research Laboratory: Some Current Interests and Opportunities"

Rao's Talk – November 15 (Fri) @ 2:00pm | Engineering Science Building (ESB), Room 1001

Raghuveer Rao is the Chief of the Intelligent Perception Branch at the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, Maryland,  where he oversees R&D in multimodal computer vision and applications, mainly to autonomous systems and scene understanding.  Prior to joining ARL, Dr. Rao was a professor of electrical engineering and imaging science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has held visiting appointments with the Indian Institute of Science, the US Air Force Research Laboratory, the US Naval Surface Warfare Center, and Princeton University. He has made multiple research contributions to signal & image processing, communication, and computer vision, and serves as an ABET program evaluator for electrical engineering. Dr. Rao is a life fellow of IEEE and an elected fellow of SPIE.