Soheil Nouri, a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the U of A, won the Three-Minute Thesis competition at the International Microwave Symposium.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Microwave Theory and Techniques Society is a transnational society with more than 10,000 members and 190 chapters worldwide. The society promotes the advancement of microwave theory and its applications, including radio frequency, microwave, millimeter-wave and terahertz technologies. The symposium is the flagship event sponsored by the society in a week dedicated to all things microwaves and radio frequency.

Microwave Week, with more than 8,000 participants and 600 industrial exhibits of state-of-the-art microwave products, is the world's largest gathering of radio frequency and microwave professionals encompassing megahertz to terahertz ranges and is the most important forum for the latest research advances and practices in the field. Microwave Week also includes the society’s Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium and the Automatic Radio-Frequency Techniques Group conference.

"Attending the Microwave Week was an invaluable, unique opportunity to learn from scholars in the field," Nouri said. "Our research goal is to introduce wave propagation effects in millimeter-wave transistors. The modeling strategy that we present in this research addresses the design challenges at high frequencies. This model can be used as a simulation tool to optimize the device before going through the fabrication stage."

The International Microwave Symposium was held in June 2021 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The Three-Minute Thesis competition at Microwave Week is designed for eligible students and young professionals whose paper is accepted for presentation.

Steve Kenney, general co-chair of the symposium, said, "This year, we received 497 manuscripts, and 290 were accepted."

Out of accepted papers, 25 finalists were selected by the Three-Minute Thesis committee in the first round of competition. John Bandler, chair of the committee, said, "In the weeks leading up to Microwave Week, finalists worked with the competition organizers for distilling and delivering highly complex, technical research to judges."

In the final round of competition, contestants delivered their presentations in three minutes or less in a language appropriate to a nonspecialist audience. A panel of nonspecialist judges ranked the finalists based on how engaging, accessible and compelling they made their presentations, and the top four ranked contestants were recognized and awarded.

"IMS is the most prestigious conference in the field, and the recognition was a significant honor," said Samir El-Ghazaly, distinguished professor of electrical engineering.