Still at the Cutting Edge

Research has always been a mainstay of the Electrical Engineering Department. Harold Smith, the first department head, came to the Institute already much respected and widely known for his pioneering studies of high-voltage transmission. He added to that reputation in his years at WPI, consulting for Westinghouse Electric Co. and designing ever larger and more sophisticated transformers, including one displayed at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904.

Power systems has remained an important focus of research in the department through the years. In recent times it has been joined by a number of other research areas that illustrate dramatically how far the field of electrical engineering has come in 100 years, and how broadly based is today's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. These active research programs receive in excess of $1 million annually in external support.

Analog Microelectronics
Analog and mixed-signal IC design, heavy-doping effects, device modeling.
(Professors Peter Lanyon, John McNeill)

Biological Signal Processing
Tactile sensor processing.
(Professor Fred Looft III)

Communications and Computer Networks
Wireless networks, global positioning, data security.
(Professors David Cyganski, William Michalson, Christof Paar, Kaveh Pahlavan)

Computer Engineering
Parallel and distributed processing, fault tolerant systems, real-time processing, VLSI design.
(Professors Wilhelm Eggimann, R. James Duckworth, William Michalson, Christof Paar)

Engineering Education
Multimedia, multidisciplinary courses, outcomes assessment, project education.
(Professors David Cyganski, James Demetry, R. James Duckworth, Wilhelm Eggimann, Hossein Hakim, William Michalson, Denise Nicoletti, John Orr, Richard Vaz)

Electromagnetic and Ultrasonic Fields
Computational methods, medical ultrasonics, microwave CAD, nondestructive evaluation, materials characterization.
(Professors Jin-Fa Lee, Peter Levin, Denise Nicoletti, Reinhold Ludwig, Peder Pedersen)

Image Processing
Machine vision, automatic object recognition.
(Professors David Cyganski, John Orr, Richard Vaz)

Power Systems
Power system state estimation, computational methods, power electronics and power quality.
(Professors Kevin Clements, Alexander Emanuel)