• Merz Receives Humboldt Award • Schlafly Dedicates Circuits Laboratory • Endowed Professorships in Electrical Engineering Announced Merz Receives Humboldt Award James L. Merz, Frank M. Freimann Professor of Electrical Engineering, has been selected to receive the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for senior U.S. scientists. A Notre Dame graduate, Merz is the fourth member of the Department of Electrical Engineering to receive a Humboldt award, joining Frank M. Freimann Professors Ruey-Wen Liu and Anthony N. Michel and Leonard C. Bettex Professor Daniel J. Costello Jr. An international leader in investigations of II-VI and other III-V compound semiconductor systems, Merz is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He currently serves on the Electronic Materials Committee of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society and is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Science, the Materials Research Society, and the Society for Values in Higher Education. A recipient of an honorary doctorate from Linköping University in Sweden, Merz is the former vice president for graduate studies and research at Notre Dame. Humboldt honorees collaborate with German colleagues in universities and laboratories throughout the Federal Republic of Germany. In spring 2002 Merz began working with Klaus H. Ploog at the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics in Berlin. They are investigating wideband gap semiconductor materials based on the compound gallium nitride. Schlafly Dedicates Circuits Laboratory When Hubert J. “Hub” Schlafly graduated from Notre Dame in 1941 with a degree in electrical engineering, he had high hopes and dreams for the future. Still, he probably never imagined that he would become part of satellite communications history, the recipient of two Emmy Awards, and the holder of 16 patents. Upon graduation Schlafly joined the General Electric Company where he worked on war-time projects such as anti-aircraft searchlights and radar-directed gunfire control systems. Later he joined Twentieth Century Fox as director of TV research. In 1951 he joined Fred Barton and Irving Kahn to form the TelePrompTer Corporation. Together they created a prompting device for actors and on-air commentators/reporters that forever changed the scope of television. Schlafly and his colleagues pursued their interest in television, developing an early version of a pay TV system and eventually working with Dr. Hal Rosen at Hughes Aircraft to use satellite technology for national distribution of cable signals. In June 1973 at a convention of 3,000 cable operators, Schlafly and TelePrompTer sent a program from Washington, D.C., via satellite to the convention floor in Anaheim, Calif. It was the first domestically transmitted national cable program. Schlafly, the chairman emeritus of Portel Services Network, has returned to Notre Dame many times since graduation as an alum and member of the College of Engineering Advisory Council. During his most recent visit, he and his wife dedicated the Schlafly Electronic Circuits Laboratory. Recurring income from an endowment provided by the Schlaflys will be used to maintain and periodically upgrade equipment in the laboratory which serves three undergraduate courses -- EE224: Introduction to Electrical Networks, EE242: Electronic Circuits I, and EE342: Electronic Circuits II. Both electrical engineering and computer science and engineering students will benefit from the state-of-the-art facilities afforded by the Schlafly gift. [back to top] Antsaklis Porod Endowed Professorships in Electrical Engineering Announced Two faculty members from the Department of Electrical Engineering have been awarded endowed professorships. Panos J. Antsaklis has been appointed the H.C. and E.A. Brosey Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Wolfgang Porod has been appointed the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Electrical Engineering. Antsaklis, a faculty member since 1980, serves as director for the Center for Applied Mathematics. His research addresses problems of control and automation and examines ways to design engineering systems that will exhibit a high degree of autonomy in performing useful tasks, as well as networked embedded systems. He also investigates problems in the interdisciplinary research areas of control, computing and communication networks, and hybrid and discrete event dynamical systems. He has more than 240 technical publications to his credit and is author of “Linear Systems,” a graduate textbook. The director of the Center for Nano Science and Technology, Porod is the co-inventor of Quantum-dot Cellular Automata, a transistorless approach to computing that was developed at Notre Dame. His research focuses on the area of nanoelectronics and the physical limits of computation. Specifically, he studies new ways of representing information in nano-scale structures and how to use these devices to implement computational functions in novel circuits. He also addresses the implications of these basic issues for the engineering design of physical systems which perform computational tasks. Porod joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1986. He has authored 270 publications and presentations. Both Antsaklis and Porod are fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. [back to top]