John D. Cressler and Justin K. Romberg, both faculty members from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), have been awarded with two of the most prestigious honors presented by the IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

Cressler and Romberg were both honored with IEEE medals at the IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit (IEEE VIC Summit) and Honors Ceremony, held virtually May 11-13, 2021. Cressler was honored with the 2021 IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal for a career of outstanding contributions to education in the fields of interest to IEEE. Romberg was honored as a co-recipient of the 2021 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal for outstanding contributions in signal processing.

John D. Cressler

As the recipient of the 2021 IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal, Cressler was honored “for inspirational teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students.” He was recognized with this award on May 11 by IEEE President-Elect Ray Liu.

Cressler is the third faculty member from ECE to receive this honor. Previous recipients include Ronald W. Schafer (1992) and James D. Meindl (1990, while with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). The James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal was established in 1956 and is sponsored by Lockheed Martin, MathWorks, Pearson, and the IEEE Life Members Fund.

“This is a tremendous honor for John, and his commitment to teaching and mentoring — and to the success and well-being of our students – is a tremendous model for all of us to follow,” said Magnus Egerstedt, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Professor in ECE.

Cressler is the Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics and the Ken Byers Teaching Fellow in Science and Religion at Georgia Tech. He has been the associate director of the Georgia Electronic Design Center since 2015. Cressler joined the Georgia Tech ECE faculty in 2002 after spending a decade as a faculty member in the Department of ECE at Auburn University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied physics at Columbia University and his B.S. degree in physics from Georgia Tech in 1984.

Cressler couples his passions for teaching and mentoring with being the leader of one of the largest, most visible, and most productive silicon-germanium (SiGe) research groups in the world. He and his colleagues have written over 700 refereed journal and conference papers, and he has graduated over 100 Ph.D. and master’s students who are now leaders in the electronics industry, academia, and government and research labs or who have started their own successful companies.

Cressler is a mainstay in the microelectronics instructional program in ECE and has introduced first-of-a-kind courses – CoE 3002 Introduction to the Microelectronics and Nanotechnology Revolution and ECE 6444 Silicon-based Heterostructure Devices and Circuits – that use textbooks that he has written and that have been adopted by other universities around the world. He also teaches IAC 2002 Science, Engineering, and Religion: An Interfaith Dialogue in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. This course is open to undergraduate students of all years and majors and has always been positively received by the students.

Cressler has received many top teaching and mentoring awards from Georgia Tech and from IEEE and Eta Kappa Nu. His goal for his Ph.D. students is to fall in love with research, while maintaining a good work-life balance, and to provide a safe place to fail and to be creative and innovative. In the classroom, Cressler believes that the keys to success are passion for what you teach, being real, being and sharing who you are and what you believe with your students, and being approachable and showing that you care.

Cressler said that teaching is his life and vocation, and he counts teaching and mentoring as his great passion in the classroom, lab, and life. “My accomplishments are best measured by the success of my students,” Cressler said. “Receiving an award for teaching and mentoring, which is something very close to my heart, means a great deal to me.”

To view Cressler’s award presentation from the IEEE VIC Summit and Honors Ceremony, please visit https://ieeetv.ieee.org/channels/communities/awards-hall-c-day-1-ieee-vic-summit-and-honors-ceremony. His presentation starts at the 6:40 mark.

Justin K. Romberg

As a co-recipient of the 2021 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal, Romberg was honored “for groundbreaking contributions to compressed sensing.” He received this medal with his colleagues, Emmanuel Candes, who holds The Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University, and Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Romberg and his colleagues were recognized with this award on May 12 by IEEE President-Elect Liu. He is the fourth faculty member from ECE to receive this honor. Previous recipients include Thomas P. Barnwell (2014), Ronald W. Schafer (2010), and James H. McClellan (2004). The IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal was established in 1995 and is sponsored by the Kilby Medal Fund.

“This is a tremendous honor for Justin, and our amazing faculty track record in receiving this award speaks of the high regard in which our digital signal processing program is held around the world,” said Egerstedt.

Romberg holds the Schlumberger Professorship and is the associate chair for Research in ECE. He is also the senior director for the Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech. Romberg joined the ECE faculty in 2006 after working as a postdoctoral scholar in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Caltech for three years. He received his B.S.E.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Rice University in 1997, 1999, and 2004, respectively.

Romberg, Candes, and Tao were recognized for their 2006 paper, “Robust Uncertainty Principles: Exact Reconstruction from Highly Incomplete Frequency Information,” which demonstrated that structured signal samples could be reconstructed perfectly from very few samples. The paper established the field of compressed sensing, which is considered one of the most important developments in signal processing in the last 50 years.

This paper spurred a flurry of research activities, with engineers and scientists exploring ways to use compressed sensing in a variety of applications. Compressed sensing has been used in wireless sensor networks, more efficient data aggregation, and improved data recovery, and has resulted in energy-efficient network routing protocols, reduced data transmission requirements, and improved network security.

Compressed sensing has even been used in astrological imaging and medical imaging. The first images of black holes from the Event Horizon Telescope were based on compressed sensing reconstruction methods. However, the greatest success of compressed sensing can be found in MRI imaging, where the technology is used to shorten the imaging process drastically without losing image quality.

Romberg said that one of the best things about the work in compressed sensing is how it has introduced him to ideas and people in many different areas of applied mathematics, such as harmonic analysis, optimization, and applied probability and statistical learning.

“It has been extremely rewarding to be exposed to new ideas from these fields by interacting with researchers on a common problem set,” Romberg said. “It has also been a pleasure to see how this early work was translated into different problem domains and built a strong foundation for me across disciplinary research, which is something that I have valued throughout my career.”

To view Romberg’s award presentation from the IEEE VIC Summit and Honors Ceremony, please visit https://ieeetv.ieee.org/channels/communities/awards-hall-a-day-2-ieee-vic-summit-and-honors-ceremony. His presentation starts at the 4:55 mark.

John Cressler will receive the 2020 Outstanding Educator Award from the IEEE Atlanta Section at a virtual banquet hosted by the group on November 10. This award is presented to a member of the Atlanta IEEE community who has exhibited continued and dedicated contributions to education through teaching in industry, government, or an institution of higher education.

Cressler has been a faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty since 2002. He is currently the Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics and the Ken Byers Teaching Fellow in Science and Religion. 

A mainstay in the ECE microelectronics instructional program, Cressler has also introduced three new courses into three different areas of the Georgia Tech curriculum, ECE 6444: “Silicon-based Heterostructure Devices and Circuits;” CoE 3002: “Introduction to the Microelectronics and Nanotechnology Revolution;” and IAC 2002: “Science, Engineering, and Religion: An Interfaith Dialogue,” which is taught through the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.  

Cressler has written books for each of these three courses. Silicon Earth (2016), now in its second edition and also translated into Chinese. Meant for a general audience, the book serves CoE 3002, which is intended for all majors, including both business and liberal arts students. Silicon-Germanium Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors (2003, with G. Niu) is the most widely cited textbook in this field and serves his graduate course, ECE 6444. In all of his courses during his 28+ year career, Cressler ends each of his classes, including IAC 2002, with a handed-out quotation and a sharing of a personal reflection relevant to his students’ lives. For this purpose, he compiled over 600 quotations and reflections in the book, Reinventing Teenagers (2004).

Cressler's career-long teaching effectiveness average is a 4.9, and he is a fully dedicated mentor to the students in his classes. On the research side, Cressler has mentored and graduated 60 Ph.D. students during his academic career (50 at Georgia Tech), and he and his team have published over 750 archival papers. The graduates of his research group have continued onto successful and meaningful careers in industry, academia, and government labs and agencies.

Cressler has received several high-level IEEE teaching and mentoring awards and has been presented with Georgia Tech’s top honors in undergraduate teaching and graduate student mentoring. In 2013, he was recognized with Georgia Tech's highest award for faculty, the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award.

Alan Doolittle has been appointed as the Joseph M. Pettit Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), effective on September 1, 2019.

Doolittle is a proud, two-time Georgia Tech alumnus, earning his B.E.E. degree with highest honors in 1989 and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1996. After graduating with his doctorate, he worked as a research engineer in ECE for five years and then joined the School's academic faculty in 2001. Doolittle leads the Advanced Semiconductor Technology Facility, which has an estimated equipment capitalization of $6 million. 

Doolittle advises eight Ph.D. students who work in the areas of microelectronic fabrication, materials growth, characterization, neuromorphic computational devices, power, high frequency transistors, and optoelectronic devices. To date, he has graduated 23 Ph.D. students, 12 master’s students, and 45 undergraduate students.      

Doolittle pioneered the area of hyper doping of wide bandgap semiconductors, which has enabled the creation of new devices that use quantum mechanical processes to reduce power losses and to allow new ways of interconnecting advanced power and optoelectronic devices. He also pioneered the synthesis of lithium-metal-oxides, which have recently gained traction for very low power neuromorphic devices; these devices emulate human brain functionality.

From 2003-2009, Doolittle was the first assistant professor at Tech to win a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) award, and in fact, he was the lead PI on two MURI programs during this period. These initiatives focused on the development of next generation epitaxial systems for three-dimensional epitaxy. Doolittle and his team developed and exploited epitaxial multifunctional oxides, a newly developing family of materials that seek to interconnect at the atomic scale using more than one environmental force in order to facilitate the development of new sensors and actuators. One example of materials that were birthed out of this field are “multiferroics,” where electric fields can tune magnetic moments. The latter MURI was an extension of his NSF CAREER Award from 2004 and led to a new branch of science in multifunctional materials.    

Doolittle currently leads a third MURI program aimed at building nanoscale devices that operate in a way that is similar to various brain functions. His MURI team’s goal is to develop an artificial retina that can learn autonomously and be used for advanced image recognition cameras for national defense and police work. He is a co-PI on a fourth MURI, led by Samuel Graham, the Eugene C. Gwaltney Chair and Professor of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. This program examines the nanoscale engineering of thermal interfaces, so as to improve heat dissipation in power electronics.

Over the years, Doolittle and his colleagues have raised approximately $38 million in research funding from multiple government agencies and industry. He has published 157 refereed journal and conference papers, and he has been issued nine patents. For his hard work and dedication to research, Doolittle was recognized with the Georgia Tech Outstanding Achievement in Research Program Development Award in 2008, the 2002-2003 Student Government Faculty of the Year Award, and the 2005 ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award.

An excellent classroom teacher, Doolittle earns teaching ratings from undergraduate and graduate students that consistently exceed the School’s norms. He has taught 1,009 undergraduates and 178 graduate students with teaching effectiveness ratings of 4.7 out of 5 in courses such as Microelectronics Circuits, Semiconductor Devices, Renewable Energy Devices, and Introduction to Microelectronic Technology. 

Doolittle is a two-time recipient of the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award, an honor determined by a majority vote of the ECE senior class, in 2003 and 2011. He also received the 2006 Georgia Tech W. Howard Ector Outstanding Teacher Award and the 2005 Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company’s Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Over the years, he has made his lab available for campus and ECE outreach tours and has advised high school teachers through various programs.           

Doolittle has long been internationally recognized as a leader in his field. He has chaired the two biggest conferences in his area of expertise, the International Workshop on Nitride Semiconductors and the International Conference on Nitride Semiconductors, and he has also been chair and program chair for these and other semiconductor conferences several times.