Department Head's Message to Prospective Graduate Students
Dr. Moshe Kam
Robert G. Quinn Professor & Department Head
Welcome to the site of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Drexel University – I am glad you are interested in us. We are a dynamic and sophisticated Department that offers first-rate study and research opportunities in state-of-the-art areas within Electrical and Computer Engineering. We also offer education and research opportunities in exciting multidisciplinary areas such as Nanotechnology, Robotics, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), and Biological Signal Processing.
The continued success of our graduate program depends on the high quality and relevance of the research performed by our professors and graduate students. Drexel was always known for the practical hands-on flavor of its education, and our research enterprise fits this model. We seek technological and scientific challenges that have societal and market need, and aim to provide innovative, original, timely and economical solutions to these challenges. It is not coincidental that practical inventions such as the bar code, the doorway metal detector, and the relational database are associated with Drexel.
High quality research requires high quality researchers, and I invite you to visit the web pages of our faculty and learn more about their interests and accomplishments. You will find that we are an energetic and diverse Department. We have seasoned faculty members of established stature and substantial records, as well as many younger colleagues who have just graduated from a Ph.D. program and who are hard at work building new research groups and establishing new research directions.
Let me introduce some of our Department’s faculty members and their research areas.
Kapil Dandekar, who came to Drexel from the University of Texas at Austin, is working on wireless communications systems that make use of smart antenna arrays. He studies array signal processing, mutual coupling in antenna arrays, vector channel propagation and prediction, cellular site planning, and electromagnetic data visualization with desktop virtual reality. One of the facilities he had developed recently (with funding from the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security) is an Anechoic Chamber for accurate measurements of antenna performance.
Gail Rosen, who came to Drexel from Georgia Institute of Technology, is working on signal processing for biological applications. She develops bio-inspired algorithms for chemical localization systems used for finding explosive and illegal substances, and on analysis of coding structure in DNA sequences. Her work illustrates how signal processing can be used to reverse-engineer biological systems, and how a better understanding of biology can improve engineering designs.
Holding degrees from Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Youngmoo Kim studies audio signal processing, machine listening, and music information retrieval. His research explored coding and synthesis of the singing voice and acoustic features relating to voice identity. One of his most recent projects is on software that analyzes songs and searches for songs with similar attributes in large databases.
Chika Nwankpa came to Drexel from Illinois Institute of Technology. He studies energy, power systems, and power electronics. He is interested in power system restoration after an outage, voltage stability, load modeling, shipboard power system analysis, and renewable energy systems such as wind and solar energy systems.
Fernand Cohen received his Ph.D. from Brown University. He works on computer vision and medical image processing. His projects include: brain imaging with different modalities, analysis of ultrasound images for tissue characterization in human organs, and face modeling and recognition.
This is of course only a partial list (we have 35 faculty members), but I hope it gives you the flavor of the interesting, important, and highly-varied work performed in our Department. More than one hundred and fifty (150) research assistants are involved with this work in the ECE laboratories. They develop theory and algorithms, design and carry out complex experiments, and respond in the process to the needs of society and industry. Indeed, our Department's research is supported financially by a large number of public and private organizations, and many of our research assistants are supported in full by external funding. Our major research supporters at present are:
US Army Research, Development and Engineering Command
Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories
In addition to research assistantships, some of our graduate students are supported as teaching assistants, and many are supported by their employers. The Department offers several full time and part time paths to a degree, and these sometimes include internships with industrial or government partners, and tailoring of thesis topics to the work area of students in industry.
Please review the description of our educational offerings on this site, and the description of the areas of interest of our faculty. Feel free to get in touch with our faculty to learn more about their projects and about opportunities to work with them on your thesis or dissertation. If you have additional questions or need to talk to one of our advisors, please contact us. We will be happy to get to know you better, and help you develop a plan of study that would fit your professional and intellectual needs.
Moshe Kam, Ph.D., P.E.
Robert G. Quinn Professor & Department Head
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Moshe Kam received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Electronics Engineering in 1977 from Tel Aviv University, and the Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Drexel University in 1985 and 1987, respectively. His professional interests include Robotics and Navigation, Multi-sensor Systems and Sensor Fields, Information Assurance, and Engineering Education. He is a Fellow of IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) "for contributions to the theory of decision fusion and distributed detection" (2001). Among his awards and recognitions are a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, an Eta Kappa Nu C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award, and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. Dr. Kam has served IEEE as Member of the Board of Directors, Member of the Executive Committee, and Vice President for Educational Activities.