Undergrads

Three from ECEE earn graduating student awards from CU Engineering

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 22:15:38 +0000

Three from ECEE earn graduating student awards from CU Engineering Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/25/2022 - 16:15

Each semester, the College of Engineering and Applied Science honors students for outstanding accomplishments and contributions to the CU Engineering community.

Graduating students are nominated by faculty, staff and peers. For spring 2022, three ECEE students were among the winners. Congratulations to Phaedra, Nanu and Will!

Check out the full list & award criteria

Congratulations to Phaedra Curlin, Nanu Dahal and Will Pryor!

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Senior aspires to be "jack of all trades"

Anonymous — Sun, 14 Jun 2015 19:47:40 +0000

Senior aspires to be "jack of all trades" Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 06/14/2015 - 13:47

This spring, senior John "Max" Dunn helped the CU Triathlon team bring home its 16th collegiate national championship and was voted in as the club's vice president. But being a student athlete only scratches the surface of Dunn's active college life.

Academically, he's a member of the Engineering Honors Program (EHP) and served as a teaching assistant for ECEE's freshman "clocks" class. In his spare time, he started an improv comedy troupe called KidzBlop with his roommate. He volunteered with a group that designed and built the tables in the Idea Forge. He swing dances once a week. He plays water polo with a group from EHP.

So how does he do it all? For a start, he chose to go with a five-year plan for his bachelor's.

"I made a conscious decision to enrich my college experience," Dunn said. "It just wasn't conducive to my learning path to do it in four. Dabbling is my forte."

A five-year plan allowed him to take his time in identifying the engineering specialty that was right for him. He started as open-option, but always had his eye on electrical engineering. In the last year, after a class with professor Milos Popovic, he's developed an interest in electronic physics and optics.

"My interests are in working on things," he said. "While I enjoy coding, it's more interesting to see physical things that work, and making silicon wafers for optics looks like magic."

And a five-year plan does not mean he gets to take things easy. Dunn describes himself as "hyper organized" and applies the same discipline to his academics that he applies to his athletics.

"Triathlon Club usually has one or two workouts available each day, and you choose the workouts you need during the week," he explained. "But during 'hell weeks,' you go to all of them."

When finals or other busy times roll around, he designates his own personal hell weeks.

"I sit down with paper and a Sharpie and plan out the week down to the 10 minutes - when I'll study, when I'll eat, everything," he said. "It takes a lot of planning and understanding how long assignments take."

He also relies on his fellow EHP students for academic support, something he recommends for all engineering students.

"Find study groups that you can rely on that won't be counterproductive," he said. "Have friends that you know you can help, and they can help you."

Being a student athlete only scratches the surface of Dunn's active college life.

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Local TV news visits satellite ground station

Anonymous — Thu, 28 May 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Local TV news visits satellite ground station Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/28/2015 - 00:00

PolarCube rig attracting attention from passersby on Boulder Creek path.

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Undergrads design nanosatellite ground station

Anonymous — Thu, 14 May 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Undergrads design nanosatellite ground station Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/14/2015 - 00:00

ECEE senior project team jumps at the chance to be part of pioneering weather research.

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Rejection only the beginning for student entrepreneur

Anonymous — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 19:50:28 +0000

Rejection only the beginning for student entrepreneur Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 03/14/2015 - 13:50

A professor who met him during his freshman year calls him "the absolute best and brightest" engineering student he's ever met. But when junior Alex Mault began his career at CU-Boulder, he technically wasn't an engineering student at all.

Mault said he fully appreciated the irony of the situation when he was passed over for admission to the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and placed into the College of Arts and Sciences instead. "I was not accepted to an engineering college because I had been too busy practicing engineering to maintain a perfect GPA," he said, adding that admissions told him there was a chance he would be able to transfer to engineering one day.

Mault is the co-founder of Reflexion Health, a health care company that is designing a 3D depth sensor they hope will make physical therapy more fun, effective and affordable. According to co-founder Ravi Komatireddy, Mault "single-handedly architected our big data infrastructure, application programing interface to access health data, and modified the computer vision algorithms related to accurately tracking joint motion using the Kinect 3D camera."

So from the beginning of his CU-Boulder career, Mault dedicated himself to two goals -- earn his way into the College of Engineering, and see Reflexion Health succeed. He pulled long hours on both classwork and his responsibilities as acting chief technology officer of Reflexion.

His efforts did not go unnoticed by his electrical engineering teachers. Associate professor Robert McLeod had Mault in a freshman projects class nicknamed "the clock class."

"Within the first week, it was obvious that Alex knew more about the topic than I did, by a lot," McLeod said. He added that Mault finished his clock project in half the allotted time and soon began coming to all of the lab's sections to help other students. McLeod soon enlisted Mault to help assemble a group of undergraduates to serve as teaching assistants for the clock class.

Mault said he was thankful for the kindness of his ECEE professors.

"They didn't care what admissions had said, and as long as I continued to show a desire for knowledge, they happily taught me," he said.

By the end of his sophomore year, both of Mault's ventures came to fruition. He was officially accepted into the College of Engineering, and Reflexion received $7.5 million in venture capital funding.

But with that success came a tough decision. Mault received a job offer to become a full-time executive at Reflexion, but he knew he would have to leave school to do it. He said it was then that he questioned what an engineer is at their core and what he wanted to be.

"I looked at the Engineering Honors community I had been surrounded by for the past two years," he said. "I loved the random, communal projects from building a full second story in a dorm room, to building a 30 MPH RC car from spare parts in our electronics kits, to impromptu 1 a.m. quantum physics lectures from fellow classmates."

With that, Mault turned down the job offer and embraced his final years as an engineering student. As his junior year began, McLeod asked Mault to be a TA for the clocks class. Professor Li Shang also invited him to serve as a TA for his Digital Design Lab course.

For most engineering students, the clocks class is their first introduction to electrical engineering. Mault said he loves showing students that electrical engineering is something they can become passionate and excited about.

"As the final project approached, students who excelled began asking the question I love to hear: 'Do you think this is possible?'" Mault said. "My response was always the same: 'Let's find out!'"

From the beginning of his CU-Boulder career, Mault dedicated himself to two goals -- earn his way into the College of Engineering, and see his health startup succeed.

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Industry award has senior project team revved up

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Dec 2014 07:00:00 +0000

Industry award has senior project team revved up Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/15/2014 - 00:00

For their senior project, the League of Extraordinary Engineers Team (LEET) is building a 1/10th scale model of an electric vehicle. But this is no ordinary model car - this one can be wirelessly powered by the road beneath it.

The team's work is building off of a public transportation project in Korea, which created electric vehicles that could be powered by or recharge their batteries from electric power strips under the road. The system is meant to decrease the number of trips to charging stations needed per day by increasing the effective range of electric vehicles.

But LEET's project puts a new spin on the technology, based on the latest trend in power electronics.

"We want to see if we can change from inductive charging to capacitive charging," team member Conrad Hougen said. "We want to see what kind of power efficiencies we can get."

The group has already built many of the necessary components, including the capacitor plate, wireless transmission, rectifier and microcontrollers. Next semester, they'll finish building a test bench for the project so they can easily swap out components and measure how much power is being transferred versus how much is being received.

Hougen said it's been exciting for the team to see all of the project's moving parts come together into a working prototype. "The next steps will be tuning the prototype to optimize power transfer and doing some mathematical modeling to see how well our project scales to a full-size vehicle."

And thanks to a $500 award from the Denver Joint Chapter of the IEEE PES/IAS, the team has the funding they need to complete their project. In November, LEET presented in the organization's PK Sen Student Design Competition, where there project impressed several dozen judges from industry.

In addition to Hougen, LEET members include senior ECEE majors James Pentz, Zachary Vogel, Sean Wilson and Vince Coghlan. The team is advised by professors Zoya Popovic and Khurram Afridi, and additional guidance has been provided by graduate students Chieh-kai Chang, Ashish Kumar and Guilherme Goularte.

This is no ordinary model car - this one can be wirelessly powered by the road beneath it.

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Keysight donates oscilloscope in honor of ECEE student

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Keysight donates oscilloscope in honor of ECEE student Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/19/2014 - 00:00

The Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering's Senior Capstone Lab now boasts one of the most advanced oscilloscopes on the market, and it's all thanks to senior Gabriella Bailado.

Keysight Technologies delivered the InfiniiVision 4000 X-Series oscilloscope to the lab in September in honor of Bailado's exceptional work with the company during her internship. In addition to working in the division that makes the scope, where she helped to produce training videos and instruction manuals, Bailado became the first intern to travel around the U.S. to conduct client trainings.

"At first, we were a little nervous about sending out an intern with a company credit card," Sales Development Manager Art Lizotte joked. "But she's done a great job with us. And who knows â€“ there could be a career in there for her." He added that Keysight has expanded the internship program to include more client-facing field work opportunities.

"She proved to us that this generation of engineers is very capable," Lizotte said. "(CU-Boulder) does a fantastic job of preparing the next generation of engineers, and it will continue to be a school where we recruit."

During Keysight's visit, Bailado confidently demonstrated the scope's capabilities to ECEE faculty members and staff, and she will soon be tasked with training students on the equipment. She said her internship was instrumental not only in exposing her to the different career options for electrical engineers, but also helped to put her schoolwork in context.

"I gained a lot of real-world experience," she said. "When I came back, the material my teachers were covering made more sense, and I was able to apply the concepts better."

Keysight provides electronic measurement instruments and systems and related software, software design tools and services used in the design, development, manufacture, installation, deployment and operation of electronic equipment. Read more about them here.

The Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering's Senior Capstone Lab now boasts one of the most advanced oscilloscopes on the market, and it's all thanks to senior Gabriella Bailado.

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Student demonstrates first-of-its-kind photonics device

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Student demonstrates first-of-its-kind photonics device Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/15/2014 - 00:00

As an undergraduate in CU-Boulder's Electrical, Energy and Computer Engineering department, Chris Poulton tried working in several labs before finding his calling designing silicon photonic devices in Professor Milos Popovic's Nanophotonic Systems Laboratory. "It's quite amazing that a lab in this field is here at CU," Poulton said. "There are not many universities doing silicon photonics. After a few months here, I knew I wanted to stay in this field for my career."

During his two years in the lab, Poulton made independent novel contributions that led to multiple publications. For one project, he utilized an IBM 45nm CMOS nanofabrication process, also used to create microprocessors such as the Power7 in Jeopardy's Watson or the Cell in the PlayStation 3. By utilizing these existing microelectronics processes, electronics and photonics can be integrated to create systems of devices on a single chip, an idea called monolithic integration.

Popovic's lab is also focused on creating optical interconnects between a computer processor (CPU) and memory (RAM) instead of electrical links, with the goal of increasing bandwidth and decreasing power consumption. To do this, they needed to build several types of photonic devices.

Poulton focused on the integrated optical filter devices needed using a resonator called a photonic crystal. A photonic crystal is a quasi-periodic structure that resonates with certain wavelengths of light. By placing photonic crystals next to optical waveguides (wires for light), some wavelengths of light will leave the waveguide and tunnel into the photonic crystal and can be re-routed to other locations on the chip.

Poulton designed the first photonic crystals in an advanced CMOS process. These crystals also had high selectivity of wavelength, allowing for high-performance filters. He then designed a device that allowed for electrical current to be sent through these crystals to increase their temperature and their index of refraction. This changes the wavelengths of light that the crystal will resonate with and create a tunable optical filter. These tunable optical filters using photonic crystals were the most energy efficient of their kind.

Afterwards, he demonstrated a "push-pull" filter, proposed over 15 years ago but never realized, with high extinction and low insertion loss. This filter was realized using two cascaded photonic crystals and engineering the optical interference between them.

Poulton finished his undergraduate career with five conferences publications, one journal submission, and one invitation to speak at a research conference at Harvard University. "None of this could have been done without the help of Professor Popovic and the Electrical Engineering Department here at CU," he said. "I had an amazing undergraduate research experience here and support from a lot of wonderful people."

Chris Poulton tried working in several labs before finding his calling designing silicon photonic devices in Professor Milos Popovic's Nanophotonic Systems Laboratory.

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Undergrad takes part in cutting-edge nanophotonics research

Anonymous — Sun, 14 Sep 2014 20:22:03 +0000

Undergrad takes part in cutting-edge nanophotonics research Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 09/14/2014 - 14:22

Jelena Notaros, a third-year undergraduate student in electrical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, has always wanted to apply her enjoyment of mathematics and physics to solve important, real-world problems in technology. When she was invited last spring by Professor Milos Popovic to join his Nanophotonic Systems Laboratory as an undergraduate research assistant, she knew it was the perfect opportunity to fulfill her goal.

"What excites me most about CU-Boulder is that you are given the opportunity to be a part of cutting-edge research," Notaros says. "I love being able to take on a challenging problem knowing my work has the potential to contribute to the future of photonics and technology as a whole."

Popovic's group is aiming to redesign communication links between microprocessors and memory chips using light and silicon photonic devices in place of electrical signals and microelectronic circuits. This introduction of light processing is a paradigm shift that will enable reduced power consumption and increased speeds in microelectronic chips, allowing continued scaling of power according to Moore's Law. The use of light in microelectronics will benefit technology ranging from supercomputers to everyday electronics such as laptops and smartphones.

Notaros is developing a novel type of numerical electromagnetic solver that will allow for advanced design of these photonic devices. Since nanophotonics manipulates light on the sub wavelength scale, simple analysis of these devices is inaccurate, and numerical solvers are critical to the design and invention of novel devices.

"These solvers implement Maxwell's Equations, the laws that govern electromagnetic fields, to describe how a device being explored manipulates optical input signals to guide and optimize the device's design," Notaros said. "Specifically, I'm working on a novel solver that will allow for efficient design of periodic optical devices referred to as 'photonic crystals.'"

Over the past year, Notaros has presented her work at several international conferences and submitted to a top scientific journal. In April, Notaros was awarded first place in the 2014 IEEE Region 5 Student Paper Competition, where she was congratulated on her accomplishments by IEEE International President Roberto de Marca and IEEE USA President Jim Jefferies.

This spring, she was awarded the 2014 Sigma Xi Undergraduate Research Award in recognition of exceptional research accomplishments. Notaros has been invited to give talks on her research at several events, including the IEEE Denver Section Meeting in June 2014 and the College of Engineering's Advisory Council Meeting, and was selected to write a feature story in IEEE HKN's The Bridge magazine.

Notaros is developing a novel type of numerical electromagnetic solver that will allow for advanced design of these photonic devices.

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