ECEE Community News - April 2021

ECEE Connects is a monthly workshop/seminar series focused on diversity, equity, inclusion and learning within the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. Please mark your calendar for the first session tomorrow, April 2.  

• What: The Importance of Mentoring, led by Carrie Ann Ngai and Juliet Gopinath
• When: 2 p.m. Friday, April 2
• Where: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/99278029009 (password: ECEEdei)

Andrew Femrite is finalizing plans for an outdoor, in-person senior design expo on Thursday, April 22, from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Please plan to attend if you’re able to show support for our talented seniors. Watch for more details coming soon!

Next week, April 5-9, is Graduate Student Appreciation Week!Check out a list of in-person and virtual events to celebrate and thank you for all of your many contributions to the university. 

We asked our faculty to share publications, awards and more from their students from the past year. Here's what they had to say! 

• Skye Reese and Matt Bossart, both PhD students in power electronics and renewable energy systems, have earned prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowships.
• Alex Anderson was lead author on a paper in Optics Express on “Observation of the Rotational Doppler Shift in Spatially Incoherent Light.” He also had a conference paper accepted to the 2021 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics on “Rotation measurement using spatially incoherent light and the rotational Doppler shift.”
• Michael “Misha” Sinner, who is defending his PhD on May 13, has had “a phenomenal year,” says advisor Lucy Pao. From July to October 2020, he published and presented three peer-reviewed conference papers, with one of them being chosen as a finalist for the IFAC World Congress 2020 Applications Paper Prize. Since October, Misha has had three journal papers and two peer-review conference papers accepted, where one of these journal papers has been chosen as a featured article in that journal. “Misha is working to submit a couple more journal papers before he officially graduates this summer. He's been tremendously productive, and it has been a true pleasure to be his PhD advisor!”
• Charlie Rackson took advantage of the COVID-induced lockdown to look deeply at the mathematical theory behind his research. “He just submitted a 23-page paper with co-authors from Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Berkeley that will significantly transform the field,” said advisor Bob McLeod. “His research is on ‘volumetric additive manufacturing,’ in which you shine a bunch of images from different angles into a vial of photosensitive resin to print any desired part inside that volume. It's a challenging inverse problem. He has demonstrated a fundamentally new algorithm that performs better, is simpler, converges faster and makes possible a number of interesting extensions to the basic technique.”
• Jianglin Zhu successfully completed his PhD thesis "Transformerless Stacked Active Bridge DC-DC Converters: Analysis, Synthesis and Design." His most recent conference paper “48 V-to-1 V Transformerless Stacked Active Bridge Converters with Merged Regulation Stage” received a student award at IEEE COMPEL 2020 and his paper “Transformerless Stacked Active Bridge Converters: Analysis, Properties and Synthesis” has been published in the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. Jianglin’s work has been sponsored by Lockheed Martin. Jianglin is now a Senior Application Engineer at Efficient Power Conversion.
• Kyle Goodrick successfully completed his PhD thesis “Systematic Optimization of DC Distribution Architectures,” and his paper "Systematic Optimization of Multiple-Output DC Distribution Architectures," has been published in the IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics. Kyle presented a paper at IEEE ECCE 2020, and will present a paper on “Systematic Design and Optimization of Large DC Distribution Architectures Using Simulated Annealing” at the upcoming 2021 IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference. Kyle’s work has been sponsored by Lockheed Martin. Kyle has accepted a position with Sandia National Laboratory.
• Satyaki Mukherjee and Yucheng Gao had their paper on “Reduction of AC Winding Losses Due to Fringing-Field Effects in High-Frequency Inductors with Orthogonal Air Gaps” published in the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.
• Satyaki Mukherjee also has his paper on “High-Performance Megahertz-Frequency Resonant DC–DC Converter for Automotive LED Driver Applications” published in IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics. Satyaki presented a paper at IEEE ECCE 2020, and will also present another two papers at the upcoming 2021 IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference. Satyaki’s work has been sponsored by Texas Instruments and by DOE.
• Yucheng Gao also presented a paper on "Soft Startup Strategies for DAB-Based DCX in Composite Converters" at IEEE ECCE 2020.
• Janko Celikovic presented a paper at the IEEE COMPEL 2020 and will present a paper on “Sliding Mode Control with Minimum-Deviation Transient Response for Non-Inverting Buck-Boost DC-DC Converters” at the upcoming 2021 IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference. Janko’s work has been sponsored by Dialog Semiconductor.
• Chandan Suthar and Inder Kumar Vedula will present a paper on “An Arbitrary Waveform Generator based on an Eight-Level Flying-Capacitor Multilevel Converter” at the upcoming 2021 IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference. Their work has been sponsored by Advanced Energy.
• Branko Majmunovic and Satyaki Mukherjee met major milestones in a large collaborative project sponsored by the DOE Solar Energy Technology Office on “Modular Wide-bandgap String Inverters for Low-cost Medium-voltage Transformer-less PV Systems.”
• Vivek Sankaranarayanan and Yucheng Gao met major milestones in a large collaborative project sponsored by the DOE ARPA-E on “A High-Voltage High-Reliability Scalable Architecture for Electric Vehicle Power Electronics.”
• Carlos Mulero has a journal paper accepted for the Special Issue of IEEE Trans. Ant. Propag. On “Antennas for Full-Duplex Systems,” as well as co-authorship on a book chapter devoted to the Full-Duplex Systems. He will graduate with PhD by the end of this semester. Thank you, Carlos, for being a great student and CU Buff.
• Conrad Andrews has designed and fabricated four different phased arrays and is now working on several journal papers while wrapping up his PhD thesis research. He has done all that while working at the CACI. Great job, Conrad.
• Aman Samaiyar has been finishing up his dissertation research while preparing to graduate and start new job at Ansys. Thank you for the years of great help to all RF students at CU.
• Jake Cazden completed another project where his delivered antennas outperformed expectations and is now working on publications while delivering monthly presentations on the new, completely different topic. Thank you, Jake, for showing a great example to all younger students.
• Songyi Yen got his first journal paper accepted to the special issue on Full-Duplex Systems. Congrats, Songyi.
• Gaeron Friedrichs has managed three different research topics, including the use of machine learning for direction finding arrays, while developing a course on electrical engineering for Centaurus High School. Awesome energy and enthusiasm – keep it up, Gaeron.
• Theodore Prince and Dong Chan Son have started two new projects and have both already achieved sufficient progress to work on another papers. Great job, guys.
• Ljubodrag Boskovic has given us continuous presence in the lab during the pandemic and kept us going strong. We all owe you, Ljuba – thank you.

• From Juliet Gopinath: “I want to thank our grad students as a whole for having the strength and courage to carry on in the pandemic, even when it means coming into campus for research or teaching on a regular basis. Hats off to you all!”
• From Lucy Pao: “I appreciate all the students in my research group: Mandar Phadnis and David Stockhouse are working on large (20+ team members) projects funded by ARPA-E, and they work well together and also with the broader teams of aerodynamicists and structural dynamicists. Nikhar Abbas has been a key developer of the Reference OpenSource Controller (ROSCO) toolbox that is now part of NREL's suite of software tools. Dave Pasley has been doing double duty this year as he has been working at NAVSEA while finishing his course work for his MS degree in ECEE. I always find the following quote from Adlai Stevenson to be appropriate as we approach graduation: ‘Your days are short here; this is the last of your springs. And now in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem of Heaven. You will go away with old, good friends. And don't forget when you leave why you came.’”
• From Dragan Maksimovic: “Throughout 2020 and 2021, in spite of all the challenges, all Colorado Power Electronics Center students kept their spirits up and exhibited incredible teamwork and above-and-beyond dedication and contributions in their research projects. Thanks to all graduate students for their dedication, hard work, and camaraderie!”
• From Bob McLeod: “Thanks for just hanging in there. PhD studies are tough enough without this dumpster-fire of a year. You all deserve to get PhDs with combat stars.”
• From Dejan Filipovic: “Thank you for keeping up with the great spirit, drive and dedication to your education throughout the pandemic. You stayed together and supported each other during the highs and the lows. Keep it up and Go Buffs.”