The 32nd International Union of Radio Science General Assembly & Scientific Symposium awarded two University of Arkansas electrical engineering graduate students a travel grant to attend and present their research to research peers, radio scientists, and all 10 URSI Commissions in Montreal, Canada. The symposium covered a wide range of electromagnetic measurements, applications and standards for radio frequencies, micro, millimeter, and terahertz waves.

Students Tyler Bowman and Clifford Kintner are both graduate research assistants in the Terahertz Imaging and Spectroscopy Computational Electromagnetics group, directed by Magda El-Shenawee, electrical engineering professor.

Tyler Bowman, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow and University of Arkansas Distinguished Doctoral Fellow, presented a paper and a poster on results from ongoing research funded by the National Cancer Institute through the National Institute Health and the NSF. Bowman's oral presentation, titled "Terahertz Imaging of Freshly Excised Invasive Ductal Carcinoma Breast Tumors," discussed the progress and challenges of using terahertz imaging to scan freshly excised human breast tissue. His poster presentation, titled "Terahertz Imaging and Segmentation of Freshly Excised Xenograft Mouse Tumors," analyzed the accuracy with which terahertz imaging is able to differentiate between healthy tissue versus diseased tissue. For this presentation, Bowman used freshly excised cancerous tissue from a mouse to compare a terahertz scan to a scan provided by a pathology lab. His results showed that terahertz imaging can accurately distinguish between the cancerous and healthy tissue of breast tumors.

Clifford Kintner presented research the characterization of metamaterials.

Clifford Kintner is a master's student whose research focuses on characterizing substances that support electrostatic fields. One of these substances is a "metamaterial," or a material that is engineered to have unique properties not found in nature. This type of material is important because it can be used to improve the performance of antennas and to give them unique capabilities. Kintner's research is part of a collaboration with the U.S. Army Research Lab in Adelphi, Maryland. His presentation, titled "Free-space Measurement of 3D Periodic Metamaterial," covered the results of his research characterizing a 3D periodic metamaterial sample using the University of Arkansas Free-space Microwave and Millimeter Wave Measurement System and the Arkansas High Performance Computing Center's cluster for correlation.

"Traveling to the URSI conference was a real eye-opener for me with regards to research," said Kintner. "Seeing what the other researchers were up to, and what the cutting edge of the field looks like, has really encouraged me to push my own work and try new things."