Professor Dan Sievenpiper's Applied Electromagnetics Group
Jacobs School of Engineering, University of California San Diego

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Group Members

Dan SievenpiperProfessor Dan Sievenpiper joined the UC San Diego faculty in 2010. He received his BS in 1994 and his PhD in 1999 from UCLA, where he studied photonic crystals and other periodic structures, and invented the high impedance electromagnetic surface. Dan joined HRL (the former Hughes Research Laboratories) in Malibu, CA in 1999. During the following 11 years, he and his team developed new electromagnetic structures, with an emphasis on small, conformal, tunable, and steerable antennas. Dan held a variety of technical and management positions at HRL including Director of the Applied Electromagnetics Laboratory. In 2010 he joined UC San Diego, where his research is focused on artificial media, and the integration of active electronics with electromagnetic structures and antennas to enable new capabilities and applications. In 2008, Dan received the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal, and also the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Piergiorgio Uslenghi Letters Prize Paper Award. In 2009, he was named as a Fellow of the IEEE, and in 2019, he was awarded the John D. Kraus Antenna Award. During 2010-2017, Dan served as an associate editor of IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters. He also served as the chair of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Administrative Committee on New Technology Directions from 2013-2014, and as the general chair of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium and URSI Radio Science Meeting which was held in San Diego in 2017. He has served as the vice chair of the ECE department from 2019 to present. Dan currently has more than 80 issued patents and more than 200 publications.

Dr. Matthew C. Smith is dual-degreed with a BSEE and a BSNS from USF. He received his MSEE in 2019 and Ph.D. in 2022 in applied electromagnetics from UCSD with focused research on complex E-field pattern synthesis techniques in conductive media (e.g., biological tissue) using multichannel coil arrays. Currently, he is a Post-Doc Scholar/Researcher at UCSD in the Applied Electromagnetics Group under Prof. Daniel Sievenpiper. His primary research areas include self-activated cavity absorbers, rf-plasma interactions, electrically small wideband tunable antennas, and bioelectromagnetics. He retired from Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems in El Segundo, CA in 2017. As a Senior Engineering Fellow at Raytheon for over 25 years, he specialized in microwave and millimeter-wave circuits, subsystems, and systems for radar, remote sensing, communications, and EW systems. His design experience includes over fifty fielded and on-orbit microwave and millimeter-wave circuit designs, seven patents (two are NIST validated), and over twenty IEEE/SPIE publications from VHF to W-Band. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.
Xiaozhen Yang received her B.S. degree in 2018 and M.S. degree in 2019 in Electrical Engineering from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and the Ohio State University, respectively. Now she is pursuing her Ph.D. degree in Applied Electromagnetics at UCSD. Her research interests include periodic structures and nonlinear devices.
Feng Li obtained her B.Sc. degree in Physics (2018) and M.Sc. degree in Optics and Photonics (2019) from Imperial College London. She is currently a Ph.D. student majoring in Photonics at UCSD under the supervision of Professor Daniel Sievenpiper. She is interested in manipulating electromagnetic wave propagation with engineered periodic structures and possible applications. Her current research topic is on plasma photonic topological insulators.
Wendong Liu received her B.S.(2020) and M.S.(2023) in Information Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University. Now she is pursuing her Ph.D. in Applied Electromagnetics at UCSD. Her current research includes high-power electromagnetic source designs.
Trenton Hegranes graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2023 with a BS in Electrical Engineering. He is pursuing his MS degree at UCSD in the Applied Electromagnetics track. Trenton's research interests and current research projects are centered around antennas and telecommunications. Trenton was also awarded the SMART Scholarship by the DoD.
Paul Bastaki received his B.S. in Physics with a specialization in Astrophysics from UC Irvine in 2021 where he researched electroweak phase transitions in the early universe. Prior to UCSD, he worked at Underwriter Laboratories (UL) as an RF Engineer, performing compliance testing on a wide range of wireless devices in the millimeter-wave spectrum. Currently pursuing his M.S. in Electrical Engineering in the Applied Electromagnetics track, his research includes utilizing direct antenna modulation to increase the bandwidth of electrically small antennas.
David Schwartz received his B.S. (2022) in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a minor in Physics from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). He is now pursuing his Ph.D. in Applied Electromagnetics at UCSD. His interests include electromagnetics in non-LTI systems and propagation in periodic structures.
Armin Ewert earned his BS in Mathematical Engineering and his MS in Electrical Engineering from the Bundeswehr University Munich in 2017 and 2019, respectively. He has served in the German Air Force as an Aircraft Technical Officer and engineer where he developed and optimized fighter aircraft communication modules as a systems engineer at Airbus Defence and Space. Armin is currently pursuing his PhD and his research centers on plasma physics, with a particular emphasis on exploring topological phenomena within magnetized plasma environments.
Pratap Vangol (Student Member, IEEE) received the bachelor’s degree in electronics and communication from the R. V. College of Engineering, Bengaluru, India, in 2022, and is currently pursuing his Masters (specialization in RFIC design and Applied EM) and PhD (specialization in Applied EM) at UCSD. During his undergraduate studies he has worked in the domain of phased arrays, specifically on algorithms for the synthesis of sparse antenna arrays and isophorically fed sparse antenna arrays, and design of active integrated antenna arrays for various applications. Mr. Vangol was a recipient of the First Place Award at the National Level Student Project Competition Presentation organized by the IEEE AP/MTT Joint Chapter, Bangalore Section. His current research interests include Topological considerations in EM structures, Integration of active circuits with EM structures, and Synthesis and Analysis of quasi-periodic/random EM structures.
Ian Broadbooks graduated from the University of Southern California in 2023 with two B.S. degrees (Electrical and Computer Engineering, Applied and Computational Mathematics) and an M.S. degree (Electrical Engineering). He is now pursuing his Ph.D. in Applied Electromagnetics at UCSD. His current research is in non-linear and time-varying electrically small antennas.
Peixing Li received his B.Eng. in electronic and communication engineering from City University of Hong Kong in 2023. He is currently a PhD student at UC San Diego majoring in applied electromagnetics. His research at CityU HK involved time-modulation of metamaterials, programmable metasurface, and antenna design and measurement. Peixing is now focusing on the study of artificial electromagnetic surfaces and incorporating active and/or digital electronics and computational techniques with them.

Alumni, and their recent positions:

Erda Wen - PhD 2023 - Apple

Rohith Mahalikudi - MS 2023 - PlaneWave Inc

Robert Davis - PhD 2023 - Commonwealth Fusion Systems

Sara Kandil - PhD 2022 - Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

Matt Smith - PhD 2022 - UCSD

Yun Zhou - PhD 2022 - Skyworks

Shreya Singh - PhD 2021 - Tesla

Kyle Thackston - PhD 2020 - General Atomics

Dia’aaldin Bisharat - Visiting Scholar 2016, and Post-Doc 2019 - City University of New York

Xianghong Kong - Visiting Scholar 2019 - National University of Singapore

Zhixia Xu - Visiting Scholar 2019 - Dalian Maritime University, China

Aobo Li - PhD 2018 - Apple

Zhixia Du - Visiting Scholar 2018 - Guangdong University of Technology, China

Jiyeon Lee - PhD 2018 - Qualcomm

Sanghoon Kim - PhD 2017 - Amazon

Shiva Piltan - PhD 2017 - Google

Chao Wang - Visiting Scholar 2016 - Huawei

Yong Luo - Post Doc 2016 - Shanghai University, China

Yunbo Li - Post Doc 2016 - Southeast University, China

Ebrahim Forati - Post Doc 2016 - TDK

Jessy Yang - B.S. 2016

Mei Li - Visiting Scholar 2016 - Chongqing University, China

Minu Jacob - Ph.D. 2016 - Keysight Labs

Jiang Long - Ph.D. 2015 - Apple

Abas Sabouni - Post Doc 2015 - Wilkes University

Hiajian Hou - Visiting Scholar 2015 - Beijing Jiaotong University, China

Jeremiah Rushton - M.S. 2014 - Los Alamos National Lab

Fei Gao - Visiting Scholar 2014 - Bell Labs, China

Zhangjie Luo - Visiting Scholar 2014 - Sichuan University, China

Yunshun Zhou - M.S. 2014 - Northrop Grumman

Ryan Quarfoth - Ph.D. 2014 - HRL Laboratories

Kristian Madsen - M.S. 2014 - Anokiwave

Han Lin - M.S. 2014 - SpaceX

Ming Huang - Visiting Scholar 2013 - University of Electronic Science and Technology, China

Hiroki Wakatsuchi - Post Doc 2013 - Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan

 

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