Funding Highlights

University of Utah electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Benjamin Sanchez Terrones has been awarded an R21 grant from the National Institute of Health for his work involving tongue cancer patients. The grant will fund a collaborative project between Sanchez Terrones and Katherine Hutcheson from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and will also support Ph.D. student Nathan Hansen, a member of the Sanchez Terrones’ lab.

University of Utah electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Yi Zhou has received the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his research into multi-agent reinforcement learning as a framework for managing multi-agent systems that involve heterogeneous agents in complex and structured environments. Zhou is the first John and Marcia Price College of Engineering faculty member to receive an NSF career award for 2023. 

For 128 years, the University of Utah’s College of Engineering has been the state’s premier research and educational institution for engineering and computer science. Today, the college receives a major boost.

University of Utah electrical and computer engineering associate professors Rong-Rong Chen and Mingyue Ji have received a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support the development of new technologies to build smart radio environments. This grant is part of a partnership between the U.S., Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland. Partners in Northern Ireland include Dr. Dmitry Zelenchuk and Dr. Muhammad Ali Babar Abbasi from Queen’s University of Belfast (QUB), and partners in the Republic of Ireland include Dr. Arman Farhang from Trinity College, Dublin (TCD).

University of Utah electrical and computer engineering professors Mingyue Ji, Rong-Rong Chen, and Cunxi Yu, along with University of Buffalo assistant professor Zhangyu Guan, have been awarded a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support their research around drone and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) networks. The grant, titled “Collaborative Research: SWIFT: Decentralized Intelligent Spectrum Sharing in UAV Networks (DISH-uNET) via Hardware-software Co-Design,” will allow the team to develop innovative solutions to the current challenges facing the design of wireless communication networks for decentralized networks of UAVs.

University of Utah electrical engineering Md-Ph.D. student Michael Adkins has been awarded a $160,000 two-year fellowship from the National Institutes of Health intended to promote diversity in health-related research. This grant will allow Adkins to further his work developing an innovative medical device able to quantify the fine motor function of stroke patients.

University of Utah electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Tsung-Wei Huang has received a one-year $298,814 NSF grant as part of broader $8 million investment from the National Science Foundation to support and grow sustainable, high-impact open-source projects. Huang had previously received a $488,675 NSF grant to further the development of his novel programming system, Taskflow. With this new NSF grant, he now seeks to explore three different applications of the program.

University of Utah electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Weilu Gao has joined a multi-institute, $1.5 million Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) grant from the National Science Foundation. Gao has been awarded this grant alongside a team of researchers headed by assistant professor Geoffrey Wehmeyer of Rice University.

University of Utah electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Jacob George has received a $200,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs “Specially Adapted Housing Assistive Technology Program" to expand his lab’s thought-based control of smart-home devices for VA patients with neuromuscular disabilities.

Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Tsung-Wei Huang has received a highly competitive three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to continue developing his novel programming system, Taskflow.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is proud to announce that four ECE faculty members have received the 2022 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award. This is the highest number of CAREER awards obtained in a single year by the department.

Electrical and computer engineering assistant professors Mingxi Liu, Mingyue Ji, Armin Tajalli and civil and environmental engineering assistant professor Terry Yang are co-principal investigators on a $3.5 million project that will develop a visual-based technology system to substantially reduces the cost of cooperative driving automation (CDA).

Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Jacob George has received a $96,500 Ascender Grant from the University of Utah PIVOT Center to develop his lab’s latest technology that detects hand motions based on electrical signals from the wrist for commercial use. The fast-paced project will last 80 days and enable his lab to turn the technology into a sleek, wearable device resembling a smartwatch. 

Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Tsung-Wei Huang has received a $10,000 grant from the nonprofit NumFocus to develop his programming system Taskflow. Taskflow is a general-purpose parallel and heterogeneous task programming system that enables users to write parallel programs with high performance and productivity.

Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Tsung-Wei Huang has received a three-year, $403,114 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a novel computing system that will address the challenges of designing, implementing, and deploying parallel algorithms on heterogeneous nodes.

University of Utah electrical and computer engineering department assistant professor Neda Nategh was recently awarded the National Institutes of Health Grant for her research on deciphering the neural code of dynamic vision. The $2 million NIH National Eye Institute grant will fund research in Nategh’s lab for at least the next five years.

ECE Assistant Professor Cunxi Yu had been granted nearly $1.13 million to develop multidisciplinary research across formal methods and deep learning.

Thanks to the generosity of the David G. and Annette T. Jorgensen Family Foundation as well as the support of additional donors, the University of Utah Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will have a new state-of-the-art undergraduate lab to enhance student learning.

University of Utah senior Dinorah Segovia is putting her love of math, engineering and the community together. “I actually didn’t really like that there wasn’t enough math in healthcare and so now electrical engineering is a great option to help people in a different way,” she said.

Two University of Utah engineering students under electrical and computer engineering chair Florian Solzbacher are part of a team that has won this year’s Bench to Bedside Competition.