2025-2026 Overview

It has been a strong year for UConn Electrical and Computer Engineering. The department welcomed a new department head and new faculty, launched a new research center, moved up in national rankings, and saw its faculty, students, and alumni recognized at every level, from best-paper awards and national fellowships to lifetime achievement honors.

By the Numbers

Faculty Honors and Awards

• Omer Khan was inducted into the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE).
• Sung-Yeul Park was appointed the Charles H. Knapp Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering.
• Ali Bazzi won the College of Engineering’s Distinguished Engineering Educator Award and was appointed the Madonna Chair in Power Engineering. He was named director of the new Connecticut Power Electronics Center of Excellence (CONPEX), hosted the inaugural Northeast Power Electronics Symposium in November 2024, and was featured in a Hartford Courant article on solar panel energy.
• Yaakov Bar-Shalom won a Best Paper Award at FUSION ’25, gave a virtual Distinguished Lecture for the Education Committee of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society, and had a paper selected for the Wall of Innovation at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center.
• Peter Willett received the 2024 Yaakov Bar-Shalom Award for a Lifetime of Excellence in Information Fusion from the International Society of Information Fusion.
• Faquir Jain received the 2025 UConn AAUP Outstanding Contribution Award. In honor of his service and leadership, the chapter renamed the award the UConn-AAUP Faquir Jain Excellence Award.

Research Grants and Funding

New research awards to ECE faculty this year include:

Faculty	Project	Sponsor	Amount
Bahram Javidi, Sung-Yeul Park, Lei Wang, Peter Willett	3D integral image sensing, battery management systems, dissolvable electronics, and ocean bottom sensing	National Institute for Undersea Vehicle Technology	$1.8M
Liang Zhang	Connecticut Manufacturing Leadership Program	State of Connecticut	$900K
John Chandy	Graduate Assistants in Areas of National Need: Quantum Device Microelectronics	Department of Education	$672K
Omer Khan	Unlocking Extreme Performance Scaling in Sparsified Graph Neural Network Models	National Science Foundation	$557K
Shan Zuo	Enabling Reasoning, Secure, and Resilient Autonomy for Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Fleet in Nuclear Domain	Nuclear Regulatory Commission	$500K

CHIPS Act research. Through UConn’s leadership in the NSF Center for Hardware and Embedded Systems Security and Trust (CHEST), John Chandy, Lei Wang, Omer Khan, and Yuyang Wang are leading research in secure computing, trusted architectures, and advanced hardware aligned with the federal CHIPS and Science Act.

Rankings

Senior Design

2025 Senior Design Demonstration Day Winners

Capstone Competition Honors

• Team 2502 (Jackson Landino, Kevin Le, and Julia Lord) won 3rd place in the IEEE Connecticut Section Capstone Project Competition.
• Team 2415 (Hritish Bhargava, Samuel Gresh, and Xander Raymond) followed up their 1st-place finish in the 2024 ECE Senior Design competition with 1st place at both the Draper Labs Capstone Symposium and the PW-IASE Capstone Competition for “Robotic Perception Sensor Characterization Platform.”

Undergraduate Achievements

• Kevin Marquis (EE/CMPE ’25) was selected as an engineering commencement banner carrier. Banner carriers are the graduating seniors with the highest cumulative GPAs.
• Vatsal Bandaru (EPHYS ’25) won a Best Oral Paper award at the Connecticut Symposium on Microelectronics and Optoelectronics and received a prestigious NSF Graduate Fellowship.
• Nick Martins (EE/CMPE ’25) won Runner-Up Undergraduate Presentation at the 2024 North American Power Symposium.
• Matthew Marczak (EE ’26) received a UConn IDEA Grant to develop a portable AI-powered escape room system, helped create a new PCB Design course with Professor Ali Gokirmak, served as a teaching assistant for ECE 2001 and ECE 3101, and completed an internship at Northrop Grumman’s Advanced Technologies Lab working on diamond-based ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors.
• Phoenix Cardwell (CMPE ’26) works as an undergraduate research assistant in Professor Simone Colombo’s quantum systems lab, interned at Zygo Corporation writing software for optical test systems, serves as a TA for CSE 3666, and coded the UConn Formula SAE team’s first IC car dashboard.
• Jonathan Hylton (EE ’26) and Tyler King (EE ’26) were members of project teams selected to present at the 2025 Sustainable Clean Energy Summit.

Graduate Student Achievements

• Alaa Selim (advised by Junbo Zhao) won the 2025 IEEE PES Grid Edge Technologies Conference three-minute Ph.D. dissertation challenge, which came with a $5,000 prize, and a Best Paper Award at the 2025 IEEE PES General Meeting. He also took 1st place in the ECE poster competition and in the data science & AI category at the Graduate Research Symposium, 2nd place in the Eversource Energy Center poster competition, and an honorable mention at the College of Engineering poster competition. He was awarded an Entrepreneurship Fellowship from the CoE Entrepreneurship Hub, and his startup idea on AI-powered battery optimization was selected as an innovation showcase at the IEEE Energy and Policy Forum.
• Soroush Vahedi won the ECE departmental award at the College of Engineering poster competition, was selected for the Virtual Showcase at the 2025 Yale Innovation Summit, and received an Entrepreneurship Fellowship from the CoE Entrepreneurship Hub. His startup idea, Powerbid, a platform connecting home solar producers and consumers to the grid, was a finalist in UConn’s 2025 Innovation Quest.
• Mohamadamin Rajabinezhad (advised by Shan Zuo) won an IEEE Industrial Electronics Society Students and Young Professionals Paper Assistance Award, was selected for the John Lof Leadership Academy E-Board, tied for 2nd place in the ECE poster competition, and was a finalist in the Grid Edge three-minute dissertation competition.
• Efstathia Safikou (advised by George Bollas) received a Senior Women Academic Achievement Award from the UConn Women’s Center, the fourth time an ECE student has earned this honor, and was selected to attend the iREDEFINE Workshop.
• Umar Salman (advised by Zongjie Wang) was selected for the 2024 Clean Energy & Sustainability Innovation Program. His Clean Utilities for Affordable Housing team, formed with a colleague from Columbia University, was named the top team in the East and Southern Africa region by the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance.
• Aalvee Asad Kausani (advised by Mehdi Anwar) won a Best Oral Paper award at the 2025 Connecticut Symposium on Microelectronics and Optoelectronics, where Nick Pappas (advised by Lei Wang) and Haoyi Wang (advised by Junbo Zhao) won Best Poster Paper awards.
• Shengqi Yuan won a Best Paper Award at the 2025 IEEE PES General Meeting.
• Yansong Pei and Bendong Tan were finalists in the three-minute Ph.D. dissertation competition at the 2025 Grid Edge Technologies Conference.
• Kevin Lindstrom (co-advised by Shengli Zhou) was awarded a Directed Energy Professional Society Graduate Research Grant.
• Leila Chebbo (advised by Ali Bazzi) won the Dominion Energy diversity award, which recognizes interns with high academic achievement who actively promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
• Yingyi Tang tied for 2nd place and Kenneth Johnson (advised by Ali Bazzi) won 3rd place in the ECE poster competition.
• Alaa Selim, Yingyi Tang, Soroush Vahedi, Haoyi Wang, and Jinxian Zhang were selected for the competitive DOE ARPA-E Summit student program.

Fellowships and Teaching Awards

• Yi Zhang (advised by Shan Zuo) received a Synchrony Fellowship.
• Ryan Harvey (advised by Peter Willett) received the Peter Willett Fellowship.
• Allen Legassey and Zongming Li received the 2025 Teaching Assistant Awards.

Student Chapters and Outreach

• The IEEE PELS & PES Student Chapter at UConn received the international award for best medium-sized student chapter, and hosted speakers from Avangrid and Flashover LLC.
• The IEEE Systems & Control Student Chapter received a $1,000 award from the IEEE Connecticut Section, and hosted speakers from Pratt & Whitney and MIT along with several career development workshops.
• The two chapters co-hosted the 2025 ECE Poster Competition.
• ECE supported the Frost Robotics Club, the FIRST Tech Challenge on campus (Spring 2025), and the Husky Robotic Invitational (Summer 2025), and continues to fund two $2,000 scholarships each year for incoming first-year engineering students who participated in the FIRST Robotics Competition.
• The department held another successful Pre-College Robotics Program, hosted by Shalabh Gupta.

Alumni Honors

Alumni in Academia

• Yishu Bai (Ph.D. ’24) spent 2024-2025 as a visiting assistant professor in UConn ECE and is now an assistant professor at the University of Evansville.
• Brittany Smith (EE ’20), who went on to earn a Ph.D. from Duke, is joining NC State as an assistant professor.

Department Milestones

New Department Head. Professor Liang Zhang was appointed head of the ECE department in August 2025, succeeding John Chandy, who served as head since 2018. Zhang joined UConn in 2013 and has served as director of undergraduate studies, Pratt & Whitney Associate Professor in Advanced Systems Engineering, and director of the DOE Southern New England Industrial Training and Assessment Center.

New Research Center. The College of Engineering launched the Connecticut Power Electronics Center of Excellence (CONPEX), housed in ECE, with Ali Bazzi as director and Georges Pavlidis as associate director for research. The center already has 12 faculty members from several CoE departments and aims to build a one- to two-megawatt test facility.

New Faculty. Dr. Yuyang Wang joined the department in Fall 2025 as an assistant professor, bringing expertise in integrated photonics, optical interconnects, photonic computing, and heterogeneous integration. He earned his Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara and was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University’s Lightwave Research Laboratory.

Endowed Fund. Professor Emeritus Matthew Mashikian, an ECE faculty member from 1983 to 1997, made a gift establishing an endowed fund to support the College of Engineering’s Entrepreneurship Hub.

Colloquia. The department hosted seminars from speakers at Yale, WPI, UMass, Columbia, the University of Arizona, UC San Diego, and Al Hussain Technical University in Jordan.