Dear ECE students, staff, faculty and friends,
I am thrilled to share ECE’s highlights from the fall semester. In reviewing these stories, I am struck by the wide range of accomplishments, as well as the newsmakers and researchers who continue to push boundaries and elevate our department.
We stress collaboration, as noted in the article about ECE’s GatorAfrica initiative. This program will connect University of Florida students and faculty with counterparts from ECE departments and engineering colleges across Sub-Saharan Africa. GatorAfrica aims to promote common research projects and knowledge bases while creating an international faculty mentoring program.
In a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, ECE has built a chip-sized device that uses forces exerted by photons to “strum” a single-crystal 4H silicon carbide (SiC) microdisk. This may open new doors to integrated sensing technologies that could operate in deep-sea labs or even in space.
Another collaboration we showcase is with our own Assistant Professor Dennis S. Kim, Ph.D., and Chemical Engineering Professor Travis Anderson, Ph.D. They are exploring predictive modeling and machine learning to improve wafer bonding, a semiconductor packaging technology used to join wafers together to create microelectronic devices.
We also are partnering with University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Tulane University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. These researchers will work with healthcare organizations and technologists to address barriers in AI-augmented decision support tools that enhance healthcare delivery, improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.
Another fascinating project comes from ECE Professors Ivan Ruchkin, Ph.D., José Príncipe, Ph.D., and former ECE Assistant Professor Yuheng Bu, Ph.D. They are creating an end-to-end methodology to model, analyze, quantify, detect and adapt to changes in the visual environment of an autonomous cyber-physical system.
We take a peek into our new Monolithic Power Systems lab in Benton Hall. Monolithic Power Systems manufactures small and energy-efficient industrial power-management solutions. The newly renovated lab space is designed to strengthen ECE’s research and teaching capabilities in power electronics.
In this issue, you will meet Instructional Assistant Professor Catia Silva, who received the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering Undergraduate Teacher of the Year Award earlier this year. Two months after winning that award, Silva won a 2025 Rising Star Award from the UF Center for Teaching Excellence.
Our labs are buzzing with diverse research projects, including a new kind of computer chip that uses light instead of electricity to perform one of the most power-intensive parts of artificial intelligence: image recognition and similar pattern-finding tasks.
And, of course, our amazing students keep making news. In October, a student team from the Florida Institute of National Security (FINS) took top honors at Gator Hack, the University of Florida’s 2025 AI Days hackathon.
Please take some time to dig into our work and accomplishments. There are exciting projects with real-world relevance in all corners of ECE. We are so proud of our faculty, staff and students, and I cannot wait to see what 2026 will bring for ECE.
Go Gators!
Sincerely,
Mark Tehranipoor, Ph.D.
Chair, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering