February 2021
Letter from the Editor
By Michael Devetsikiotis, University of New Mexico
Dear ECEDHA family and friends,
Happy February! With some luck this is frequently a month for starting the transition from Winter to Spring. And emblematically, this year, we may be starting to see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.
To stay on the analogy, this may still go either way: Winter making a frosty comeback and the pandemic relancing with COVID variants and other setbacks. Besides luck, preparation is crucial. Science is fighting back the virus and, in the meanwhile, us at ECEDHA and the ECE folks on the ground, we keep doing our best to serve our communities.
So, as we get on with 2021, in the Source as in ECEDHA, our focus remains on our constituents. On the ECEDHA category calls, the upcoming Summit, the workshops, and all the other activities, we are putting our emphasis on our students, our staff, our faculty, and our “customers,” i.e., the industry that employs our graduates.
Serving our constituents is at the center of our motivation and our efforts. We try to maximize the access to our platforms and the diversity of our voices and our faces. We feel that our faculty, our staff and our students have their stories to tell, especially during the pandemic, but also for what comes after. Therefore, we continue in this issue of the Source to present different points of view, ranging from hands-on teaching, to student concerns, to Chair profiles and industry perspectives.
A major effort undertaken by ECEDHA this year is to launch and have funded Project RECET for remote labs and materials to be shared among our departments across the country. A pilot version was launched in 2020 and we are currently working on an NSF proposal to fund the project going forward.
Another major national effort includes the diversifying and broadening of our student and graduate pool. We look forward to seeing extensions and expansions of programs such as iREDEFINE and ExCEllence in Senior Design, that focus on job skills, diversity, and connecting our students with real life skills and great careers.
The Source editorial committee is collecting input and articles from all corners of our ECE community. I invite you to send us your ideas, your points of view and your suggestions for special issues and features. We are especially keen to hear from student organizations, individual faculty, staff members and lab professionals. We plan to run some special issues on emerging areas such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and data science/processing.
In this issue of the Source, we bring a new piece from Jane Halpern, Communications Officer in the EECS Department at MIT. Jane highlights Prof. Stefanie Mueller's successful adaptation of a hands-on lab due to COVID. Additionally, we are pleased to shine a spotlight on ECEDHA leadership, including past Edtior-in-Chief and current Board Member, Badri Roysam (University of Houston) and Corporate Advisory Council Member, Patrick Kane (Infineon).
Have a great month and please stay healthy!
Michael Devetsikiotis
Professor and Chair, Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of New Mexico
Email: mdevets@unm.edu