The Charles Wilts Prize is awarded every year to one EE graduate student for outstanding independent research in Electrical Engineering leading to a PhD. View a list of recipients.


David Rutledge, Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering, has been awarded the 2010 Kenneth J. Button Prize "for pioneering contributions to millimeter-wave technology, including integrated-circuit antennas for submillimeter waves, imaging antenna arrays, and quasi-optical systems." Awarded annually, the prize consists of a bronze medal, a certificate, and £2,000.

Water Parasite Imaged by Caltech's Microscope-on-a-Chip
Caltech's Lap Man Lee, Xiquan Cui, and Changhuei Yang, the developers of the "microscopic microscope", a lens-less, super-compact high-resolution microscope, small enough to fit on a finger tip, have used the device to obtain high-quality images of the water pathogen Giardia lamblia. "The Giardia images were surprisingly interesting because we can see the flagella in them, which I did not expect," says Yang. The work, published April 14 in the online-first version of the journal Biomedical Microdevices, is an important step toward cheap, in-the-field water-quality testing. Adds Yang, "This may one day lead to a compact device that you can dip into a river or a pool of water to determine if it is safe enough to drink. This can have applications in resource-poor environments."

Over the past few decades, the transistors in computer chips have become progressively smaller and faster, allowing upwards of a billion individual transistors to be packed into a single circuit, thus shrinking the size of electronic devices. But these circuits have an intractable design flaw: if just a single transistor fails, the entire circuit also fails. One novel way around the problem is a so-called self-healing circuit - one that can detect, isolate, and fix its own flaws, both by working around the defective transistors by modifying the properties of the rest of the system and introducing additional transistors into the system in a seamless fashion. Such circuits are "inspired by biological systems that constantly heal themselves in the presence of random and intentional failures," says Caltech professor Ali Hajimiri. Toward this end, Hajimiri has been awarded a four-year, $6 million grant by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop self-healing circuits for millimeter and microwave frequencies, with applications in imaging, sensing, communications, and radar. Read more...

Caltech's Shuki Bruck Wins Feynman Prize for Teaching
Jehoshua "Shuki" Bruck, Caltech's Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Computation and Neural Systems and Electrical Engineering, has been awarded the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Caltech's most prestigious teaching honor, the prize was established in 1993 "to honor annually a professor who demonstrates, in the broadest sense, unusual ability, creativity, and innovation in undergraduate and graduate classroom or laboratory teaching." A member of the Caltech faculty since 1994, Bruck was the founding director of the Information Science and Technology (IST) program from 2003 to 2005. His research combines work on the design of distributed information systems and the theoretical study of biological circuits and systems.

Robert McEliece, Allen E. Puckett Professor and Professor of Electrical Engineering, has won the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal for exceptional contributions to the advancement of communications sciences and engineering. In particular, McEliece is being recognized for fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of error-correcting codes and to the design of deep space telecommunication systems. ">