CETA Faculty Earn Accolades

At this year’s induction ceremony at the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame Dr. Abby Ilumoka, professor of electrical and computer engineering, will be honored as “one of the best of ‘A New Century of Women in Science,’” for her leadership and achievements in electrical engineering and her efforts to mentor young women. The ceremony is to be held on October 30.

Dr. Ilumoka, who earned her Ph.D. at Imperial College, London, UK, specializes in ULSI circuit design and optimization, high speed interconnect crosstalk and delay prediction, artificial neural networks, circuit design and optimization, system-level interconnect crosstalk minimization, knowledge-based RFIC synthesis, spiral inductor modeling, and artificial neural networks. She is a Chartered Electrical Engineer. In addition to teaching in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department here in CETA and among her mentoring activities, Dr. Ilumoka has participated as an instructor for CPEP, the Connecticut Pre-Engineering Program that runs a summer program here in CETA’s buildings on the University campus.

The Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame publicly honors the achievements of Connecticut women. Among the many inductees to its Hall of Fame are Beatrice Fox Auerback, Barbara Kennelly, Marian Anderson, Madeleine L’Engle, and Clare Boothe Luce. The Center also runs various programs such as the Ella Tambussi Grasso Center for Women in Politics, which helps women interested in and active in politics in the state. The women who will be inducted into the Hall of Fame during the event at which Dr. Ilumoka will be honored are Barbara McClintock, Patricia Goldman-Rakic, Joan Steitz, and Jewel Plummer Cobb, all scientists.

Dr. Ladimer S. Nagurney, associate professor of Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering, has been selected for elevation to Senior Member in the Radio Club of America, the oldest professional society in the field of radio (now including radio, television, cell phones, etc.)

Dr. Nagurney is currently on sabbatical leave from the University, working at the Center for the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA), an NSF research center that is a partnership of the University of Massachusetts (the lead institution), the University of Oklahoma, Colorado State University, and the University of Puerto Rico, along with other academic institutions, governmental organizations, and industry. CASA is dedicated to engineering revolutionary weather-sensing networks that will save lives and property by detecting the region of the lower atmosphere currently below the range of conventional radar, mapping storms, winds, rain, temperature, humidity, and the flow of airborne hazards. Dr. Nagurney is working at CASA’s lead office in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts with UMass faculty on integrating multi-band digital transceivers and software-defined radio systems into pulse compression weather radars. His host there is Professor David McLaughlin, the Center Director.

The Radio Club of America was founded almost 100 years ago by a small group of radio amateurs and experimenters. Among its members have been such leaders in the industry as Edwin Armstrong, David Sarnoff, and Allen B. Dumont, to name a few. Senior membership is an honor conferred by the society on relatively few members.

CETA congratulates both Drs. Ilumoka and Nagurney for the honors being conferred on them.