ECEE faculty and staff recharges for year ahead!

We asked our faculty and staff from the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering on how they recharged ahead of the new academic year. 

Here is a glimpse of how our department member spent their summer in 2024:

Robin Elliot (Finance Manager): I spent my summer vacation riding my bicycle. The three images are all from RAGBRAI. It is the oldest and largest ride of its type in the country. I went with Tania Nowell (also a CU ECEE grad) and Kathy Stetzman, the finance manager in Civil. She is also a CU grad. We made sure that CU was represented on Alum day on our ride. We got several Sko Buffs as we pedaled our way across Iowa.

Chris Myers (Department Chair): Our fun summer trip was to Paris for the Summer Olympics (see photo below).  My wife and I met our son who is studying in Berlin for his PhD in Physics at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, the German equivalent of NIST.  This picture is outside the Olympic Aquatics Centre where we had just watched the Men’s Synchronized Platform Diving.  We also took in the Men’s gymnastic team final, a couple water polo matches, rowing, and canoe slalom.  It was an amazing experience.  We had also attended the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002, but our son was only three at the time, so I’m sure he will have more memories of this one.

Kim MacGregor is excited to share her new album, Firebird, that released this summer on all streaming platforms.  If you like stacked harmonies, piano, and a bit of storytelling, this one is for you! Search Kimber Grace – Firebird on your platform of choice, or ask Kim for a link and she’ll be happy to share it with you!  

Here is a picture of the album artwork, and this link should take you to a page that lists all streaming services the album is available on.

Robin McClanahan (Manager of Operations): I went to California to visit family and took a week off to go to the coast in Crescent City and hike among the Redwoods. 

Lucy Pao (Professor): I’ve been on sabbatical over the last year and continued to spend most of this summer away from Colorado, so I’m not sure if I qualify to provide a contribution here.  In any case, my summer was very productive as well as fun:

I visited the Flensburg University of Applied Sciences and gave an invited research seminar there in May.  Flensburg is the northernmost city in Germany, right on the border with Denmark.  My former visiting PhD student David Schlipf is now doing very well there as a Professor and hosted a really wonderful time for me there, showing me their research wind turbines and lidar measurement systems as well as taking me for a visit to the former medieval Haithabu Viking city.
 

At the end of May, I traveled to Florence, Italy for the Science of Making Torque from Wind conference (called “Torque” for short).  This is a major biennial international wind energy conference sponsored by the European Academy of Wind Energy.  During the Torque conference, there was a lovely 5 km fun run that I participated in along with 150 (about 20%) of the conference attendees; the 5km run started at the Piazzale Michelangelo,  went past many historical and touristic sites, and ended at the Piazza del Duomo in the city center for Florence.  My group had 3 papers published in the peer-reviewed conference proceedings,  and two current PhD students (Mandar Phadnis and David Stockhouse) and a former postdoc (Manuel Pusch) did great jobs presenting these papers at the conference.  While in Italy, I also visited Lucca, Pisa, and managed to hike across all 5 of the Cinque Terre seaside villages over one weekend.  

I continued my sabbatical exchange at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) over the summer.  Their academic year doesn’t end until early July, and in June I participated as a member of a hiring committee for a part-time professor from industry and also as a committee member for a PhD defense candidate.  The part-time professor concept is interesting and is definitely something we don’t have at CU Boulder.  At TU/e, they have quite a few 20% part-time faculty from industry, who each spend one day a week at TU/e.  Their salaries are generally fully paid by industry, and the university provides them shared office space and access to students.  They often serve on PhD committees and their companies often will fund a PhD student on related projects of interest to the company.

In late June, I visited the University of Stuttgart and gave a colloquium in the Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control.  I also visited with researchers in the Wind Energy group at Uni Stuttgart.  Stuttgart was one of the host cities where Euro 2024 soccer matches were being played, and while I didn’t attend any games, it was fun to observe the excitement in the city.

In July, I attended and gave a plenary talk at the International Federation of Automatic Control Symposium on Control of Power and Energy Systems in Rabat, Morrocco.  I had never been to Morrocco before, and I enjoyed exploring the city over the weekend after the conference with a few other conference attendees.

I’ve visited a number of cities and villages throughout The Netherlands and nearby countries during my sabbatical exchange here.  This summer, I’ve enjoyed visiting Brussels over one weekend in June as well as  Nijmegen during their famous Vierdaagse Feesten (annual International Four Day March) in July.  I also enjoyed going to RoboCup 2024, which was held right in Eindhoven, and the TU/e team again (for their 8th time) won the RoboCup Mid-Size Soccer Championships.

Tamara Lehman (Assistant Professor): This past summer, I attended ISCA in Buenos Aires Argentina (my hometown) and the first iteration of the conference in Latin America. It was a huge milestone for the computer architecture community. 

Cody Scarborough (Assistant Professor): I would like to highlight the work of undergraduate student, Mr. Jacob Stewart, within my lab over the summer.

After putting in a monumental amount of effort, Jacob has designed, constructed and tested a device called a planar near-field scanner over the summer. The device allows users to visualize electromagnetic fields in 3D space and to compute the radiation from microwave devices like printed circuits and antennas. Jacob took ECEN 3400 from Prof. Scarborough in Fall 2023 and has made exceptional progress as an undergraduate researcher. The nearfield scanner system he designed includes a programmed microcontroller that coordinates 3 stepper motors to position an RF probe at various locations around an "Antenna Under Test" (AUT). His system also interfaces with a vector-network analyzer to compute the fields generated by the radiating element.

I was thoroughly and pleasantly surprised by Jacob's progress this summer. He has become immersed in the culture of my research group and is sure to excel as a future graduate student. He plans to submit graduate applications this semester, and I am thrilled to have been a part of his research career.

Lori Meehan (Graduate Program Advisor): This is my birthday celebration hike in May to Laguna 69 outside Huaraz, Peru, a nice 8.6 mile round-trip hike up to 15,092′ feet of elevation.