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Azadeh Ansari has been named as a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Ansari holds the Sutterfield Family Junior Professorship in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

The title of her award is "Radio Frequency Spectrum Sensing with a Fine-Tooth Nanomechanical Comb,” and it will start on March 1, 2020 and end on February 28, 2025. The tremendous growth of wireless devices and Internet of Things (IoT) applications has placed a great strain on the radio frequency (RF) network infrastructures, congesting the channels and overcrowding the radio frequency spectrum. 

Battery-operated smart devices, such as smartphones, wearable technologies such as smartwatches and glasses, autonomous machines, personal radars, and other smart gadgets, all compete for bandwidth and require efficient spectrum utilization. To combat the looming RF scarcity, a chip-scale, tunable multi-GHz nano-mechanical frequency comb generator is proposed that utilizes the parallelism resulting from the multiplicity of the comb teeth to perform RF spectrum sensing in a fraction of the time, in a smaller form factor, using lower power, and with far fewer circuit components than the current state-of-the-art hardware solutions.

Ansari joined the ECE faculty in August 2017 after working as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Physics at Caltech. She is a member of the nanotechnology and the electronic design and applications technical interest groups. Her research interests are in nano/microelectromechanical systems (N/MEMS), nonlinear mechanical frequency combs, radio frequency acoustic devices, and micro-robotics.

Ansari has published over 30 refereed journal and conference papers and has one published patent and three patent applications. She was a Center for Teaching and Learning Class of 1969 teaching fellow in Spring 2019. Ansari is the director of the Center for Muscle-Inspired Actuators for Multi-scale Robotics, an Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology-funded center for multi-disciplinary research.