Graduate Fellowship Award Selection Committee | IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Society

Graduate Fellowship Award Committee Chair

Jay McDaniel

University of Oklahoma

United States

Jay McDaniel

Biography

Jay W. McDaniel (S'12--M'18) received the B.S. degree in Electrical
Engineering from Kansas State University of Manhattan, KS, in 2013, the
M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kansas of
Lawrence, KS, in 2015, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering
from the University of Oklahoma of Norman, OK, in 2018. His research
interests include all-digital phased array radar system design for defense
and remote sensing applications; RF/microwave passive component
design and integration; radar cross section measurement techniques in
cluttered environments; multi-sensor fusion techniques for position,
navigation, and timing applications; and distributed coherent radar sensor
networks.
From 2015 to 2016, he was a Radar Systems Engineer with the
Department of Energy's Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC),
where he also served as an RF/Microwave expert for several plant-driven
research and development (PDRD) projects. In August 2018, he joined the
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of
Oklahoma (OU) as an Assistant Professor and conducts research out of
the Advanced Radar Research Center's (ARRC's) Radar Innovations
Laboratory (RIL). In 2023, Dr. McDaniel joined OU's Office of the Vice
President for Research and Partnerships as an Aerospace and Defense
Faculty Fellow. His research has been supported by Sandia National
Laboratories (SNL), the National Security Campus (NSC), Office of Naval
Research (ONR), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and industry
partners.
Dr. McDaniel is currently the chair of the IEEE instrumentation and
measurement societies (IMS) graduate fellowship award committee, the

inaugural young affiliate member of the microwave theory and techniques
technical committee TC-4 on “Microwave Passive Components and
Transmission Line Structures” and TC-24 on “Microwave/mm-wave Radar,
Sensing, and Array Systems,” and an associate editor for the IEEE
Transactions on Radar Systems. He is a recipient of several awards,
including the meritorious Richard K. Moore Best Master's Thesis Award at
the University of Kansas in 2015, the Office of the Vice President for
Research and Partnerships Award for Excellence in Research Grants at
the University of Oklahoma in 2021 and 2023, the prestigious National
Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2022, and the IEEE IMS
Outstanding Young Engineer Award in 2023.

Affiliation(s)

University of Oklahoma

United States

Graduate Fellowship Award Committee Member

Kurt Barbé

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels

Belgium

Kurt Barbé

Biography

Kurt Barbé (S’05-M’09-SM’16) received the Master degree in Mathematics and the PhD degree in engineering from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium, in 2005 and 2009 respectively. Presently, he is a professor at the VUB at the faculty of Medicine. He is furthermore a co-founder of the research group Digital Mathematics (DIMA) holding a strong expertise in applied mathematics for engineering sciences and beyond. At VUB, he is the founder of the interfaculty centre for data-processing and statistics providing statistical and methodological support to the university community at large. Dr. Barbé is a former research fellow of the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) and VUB-coordinator of FLAMES – the Flemish inter-university training network on research methodology and statistics. His current research interest is in the field of numerical methods and computational statistics applied to biomedicine.

Dr. Barbé has served as an Associate Editor since 2010 and Associate Editor in Chief in 2018-2019 for the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement. Since 2017 he has served as secretary of the royal Belgian statistical society. Finally, since 2019 he has joined the editorial board for the journal Fractal and Fractional as well as Sensors. He was a recipient of the Outstanding Young Engineer Award from the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society in 2011 and the Andi Chi Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement in 2013. Two PhD students received the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Graduate Fellowship award under his supervision in 2012 and 2017.

Affiliation(s)

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels

Belgium

Sara Sulis

University of Cagliari

Italy

Sara Sulis

Biography

Sara Sulis is Associate Professor of Electrical and Electronic Measurements at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of the University of Cagliari, Italy.

In 2020 she received the National Scientific Qualification to function as a Full Professor, 09/E4 Measurements. She was an Assistant Professor from 2006 to 2019. In March 2006, Dr Sulis was awarded a Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering at the University of Cagliari, where she also received an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering.

She is Secretary of TC-39 “Measurements in Power Systems”, selected as the recipient of the 2016 Outstanding TC Award for the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, and a member of the Italian CEI CT-38 “Instrument transformers” and of the WG47 of the IEC TC-38 “Instrument transformers”. She is a member of IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, of the “Associazione Italiana Gruppo Misure Elettriche ed Elettroniche”, GMEE, and of the Didactic Commission of the GMEE.

Her research activity focuses on Power Quality issues, i.e. any deviations of voltage and current characteristics from sinusoidal, symmetrical conditions and nominal frequency, in power systems with special attention to harmonic pollution. Over the years, she has worked on the metrological qualification of the measurement processes involved in the above topics and she proposed a numerical approach based on a Monte Carlo probabilistic method as an advantageous alternative to the traditional analytical methods for the evaluation of the uncertainty in measurements obtained by digitally processing sampled input data. In recent years, the research work has focused on distributed measurement systems applied to electric distribution grids and designed to study reliable methodologies to perform both the state estimation and harmonic sources estimation of the network.

Author and co-author of more than 100 scientific papers, she has published on international journals (IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, Energies, COMPEL, EPQU) and on Proceedings of International Conferences sponsored by IEEE Societies and IMEKO. She is a reviewer for international journals and for international conferences, in particular, IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I2MTC) and IEEE International Workshop on Applied Measurements for Power Systems (AMPS). She was an “Outstanding reviewer of 2014” of the Instrumentation and Measurement Society for the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement.

During 2013, she obtained the Faculty Course Development Award, funded by the Instrumentation and Measurement Society, for the course “Sistemi Automatici di Misura”.

Since 2018, Dr. Sulis is Referent for the Quality of the Council for the Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, B.Sc. degree, at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, University of Cagliari.

Affiliation(s)

University of Cagliari

Italy

Vedran Bilas

University of Zagreb

Croatia

Daniel Watzenig

Professor, Graz University of Technology

Virtual Vehicle Research

Austria

Daniel Watzenig

Biography

Daniel Watzenig was born in Austria. He holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and was awarded the venia docendi (adjunct professorship) for electrical measurement science and signal processing from Graz University of Technology, Austria. He is CTO and Head of the Electronics Systems and Software Department at Virtual Vehicle Research Graz. In addition, he was appointed as a Full Professor of Multi-Sensor Perception of Autonomous Systems at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision, Faculty of Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering, Graz University of Technology, Austria.

His research interests focus on sense & control of autonomous vehicles, sensor fusion, reinforcement learning and decision making under uncertainty. He is the author or co-author of over 200 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, patents, and articles. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the SAE Int. Journal on Connected and Automated Vehicles (SAE JCAV). Since 2019 he is invited guest lecturer at Stanford University, USA, teaching multi-sensor perception for autonomous systems (Principles of Robot Autonomy). He is the founder of the Autonomous Racing Graz Team. Since 2024 he is Vice Chair and Member of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Austria Section. He is IEEE Distinguished Lecturer in the field of autonomous vehicles, Board Member of the INSIDE Industry Association (European Initiative on Intelligent Digital Systems) and Member of the Academic Advisory Council of PAVE (global Partners for Automated Vehicle Education). He has been a consultant and appointed expert for military robotics for the Armaments and Defense Technology Agency of the Austrian Armed Forces since 2019.

Affiliation(s)

Professor, Graz University of Technology

Virtual Vehicle Research

Austria