Elif Kaya, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, was awarded the 2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) Graduate Fellowship. This is the highest honor that the IEEE MTT-S gives to top graduate students recognizing their research activities and promise in microwave engineering.
Kaya is among 12 elite graduate students from across the globe to have been named a recipient of this award annually and the second Texas A&M doctoral student to be given this prestigious award. She will be presented with the award during the Student Awards Luncheon at the 2020 IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS), which will be held June 21-26 in Los Angeles, California.
She won the award for her research proposal titled “A CMOS Microwave Broadband Adaptive Dual-Comb Spectroscopy System with AI Calibration for Liquid Chemical Detection,” conducted under the supervision of her advisor, Dr. Kamran Entesari. Her proposal is based on her accepted paper for the IMS, which reports the first complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor Microwave Broadband Dual-comb Dielectric Spectroscopy System with an on-chip sensor and system calibration.
Kaya completed her undergraduate study in electric and electronic engineering at the Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey, where she graduated top her of class. She received an M.S.E in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, and an M.Sc. in electrical and computer engineering from Columbia University, New York, and she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Texas A&M. Her research interests include RF/microwave/millimeter-wave integrated circuits and systems, microwave chemical/biochemical sensing for laboratory-on-chip applications, and fifth-generation communication systems.
She also placed first in the student poster competition at the IEEE Texas Symposium on Wireless Microwave Circuits and Systems in 2019; was one of the top three finalists for the Advanced Practice Paper Competition at the 2019 IEEE International Microwave Symposium by IEEE MTT-S, of which she was the first Texas A&M graduate student nominated for this award; was a Texas A&M 2019 National Science Foundation Innovation Corps Site Fellow, and was a recipient of the 2017 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Student Travel Grant Award that recognizes and promotes early career accomplishments in all solid-state circuits fields, of which she was among 24 elite graduate students from across the globe to have been supported to travel to the 2017 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Conference.