Introducing Electrical and Computer Engineering's New Faculty

Front row from left: Associate Professor Ian Hiskens, Assistant Professor Michael Schulte, and Professor Nigel Boston; back row from left: Assistant Professor Hongrui Jiang, and Assistant Professor Zhenqiang (Jack) Ma. (30K JPG)

Nigel Boston joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2002 as a full professor, under the Computational Sciences Cluster program, with a shared appointment of 75 percent time in mathematics, 25 percent time in ECE.

He earned his PhD in mathematics in 1987 from Harvard University. Boston conducted postdoctoral research at IHES in Bures-sur-Yvette, France, has taught at the University of California-Berkeley and most recently at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Boston's early work in number theory provided a key step in the celebrated recent proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. He continues his strong work in pure mathematics, with complementary applied research interests in information protection, cryptography, coding theory, watermarking, and algebraic methods in filter design.

Ian Hiskens joins ECE as an associate professor in the power and control systems areas. He has most recently been a visiting associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to that, Hiskens was a tenured senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia, which is also the institution at which he obtained his PhD in 1991. He has considerable industrial experience with the Queensland Electricity Commission, Australia.

Hiskens' research interests include power system dynamics, optimal and nonlinear control systems, parameter estimation, computational techniques for hybrid systems, stability analysis and simulation algorithms for differential-algebraic systems, and robotics.

He also is affiliated with the Power Systems Engineering Research Center. For the fall 2002 semester, he is teaching ECE 342: Electronic Circuits II.

Assistant Professor Hongrui Jiang most recently was a postdoctoral researcher at the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center. He completed his PhD at Cornell University in 2001. His research interests include microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and nanoscale electromechanical systems (NEMS), packaging technologies for MEMS, biological applications of MEMS, micro-fluidics, and radio-frequency integrated circuit design.

Hongrui is teaching ECE 340: Electronic Circuits I in the Fall 2002 semester and plans to introduce a new mixed undergraduate/graduate course on MEMS technology for the spring 2003 semester.

New ECE Faculty: Coming Soon! (24K JPG) Robert Blick has accepted our offer of an associate professor post, and will officially join the department on January 10, 2003. Blick's research interests are in the nanotechnology field, and he comes to us from his current post at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich Germany. (15K JPG) Robert Nowak has accepted our offer of an associate professor position in ECE, with plans to start with us in late May of 2003. Nowak is in the image processing area, and joins us from his current post as tenured associate professor at Rice University.

Jack Ma joins the ECE department as an assistant professor. Professor Ma is in the solid state device area, with special interest in silicon and III-V materials and devices, SiGe-HBT based power amplifiers, and nanoelectronics.

Ma joins UW-Madison with one year experience at Conexant Systems of Newport Beach, California, following his PhD at the University of Michigan in 2001. He is teaching ECE 548: Integrated Circuit Design, in the fall, and will teach ECE 549: Integrated Circuit Fabrication Laboratory, in spring 2003.

Assistant professor Mike Schulte conducts research in computer engineering with interests focusing on special processor architectures for digital signal processing and cryptography, embedded systems, VLSI design and computer arithmetic.

Schulte earned his PhD from the University of Texas-Austin in 1996. He obtained his BS degree here at UW-Madison and brings his experience from a previous faculty post at Lehigh University where he directed the Computer Architecture and Arithmetic Research Laboratory.

He is teaching ECE 551: Digital System Design and Synthesis, for the fall semester.