College of Engineering distributes annual awards recognizing research excellence
Two Wayne State University faculty members were recently recognized with Research Excellence Awards from the College of Engineering. The honorees are Dimitrios Sounas, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Jitao Zhang, assistant professor of biomedical engineering.
Sounas holds seven patents, has published more than 100 journal papers and received more than 12,000 citations, with an H-index of 51. He has accumulated more than $1.2 million in externally funded grants from various Department of Defense agencies, including IARPA and AFOSR. His research focuses on the design of electromagnetic metamaterials for various applications across the electromagnetic spectrum. His work on time-modulated metamaterials has solved a long-standing problem in the design of critical devices for communication systems, enabling their miniaturization and integration on chip. More recently, he has expanded his interests into analog computing metamaterials for applications in imaging and machine learning. He has received the 2021 Brillouin Medal from the International Phononics Society and the 2020 Leopold B. Felsen Award from the European Association on Antennas and Propagation, and is a senior member of IEEE.
Zhang leads the Biomedical Optics and Instrumentation lab that aims to innovate optical imaging technologies named Brillouin microscopy for combating metastatic cancer diseases and birth defects. He has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed research articles and holds three patents on Brillouin technology. His recent work has been featured in “The 10 biggest science stories of 2022” by The Guardian. The research in Zhang’s lab is supported by the K25 award and R21 grant from the National Institutes of Health, the Institutional Research Grant from the American Cancer Society, and the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.