Three ECE research teams took prizes at GW’s 2019 TCO Innovation Competition. In the Life Science category, Dr. Mona Zaghloul and her doctoral students Yangyang Zhao and Libin Sun received the First Place prize and $10,000 for their work, “Ultra-Small Portable Nano Hole Array based Gas/Condensed Phase Sensing System for Hazard Warning and Health Monitoring.” Their research, done in collaboration with NIST, provides a promising technology toward next generation smart sensing systems.
ECE Research Scientist Dr. Matthew Lumb won the First Place Prize in the Physical Science category for his poster, “Switching-free DC Voltage Conversion.” This type of converter could be useful in devices with components sensitive to excess noise, such as medical devices or defense systems. Dr. Lumb’s converter would be an alternative to current options, which generate waste heat and can require multiple components.
The Second Place Prize in the physical science category was claimed by the team of Drs. Tarek El-Ghazawi and Volker Sorger and doctoral students Engin Kayraklioglu and Shuai Sun for their poster, “The Reconfigurable Optical Computer.” This nanophotonic analog reconfigurable computer is capable of computing out of first principles by solving those partial differential equations that are used for most simulations in science and engineering. The team already a U.S. patent for this--US Patent No. 15/369,371: T. El-Ghazawi, V. J. Sorger, S. Sun, A. H. A. Badawy, V. K. Narayana, (2017).