EECS Students Spend Summer at Defense Research Labs

Three KU EECS students participated in summer internships at defense research laboratories around the country. Ph.D. students John Jakabosky and Cenk Kahn and undergraduate Dana Memmingsen were involved with cutting edge research, obtained real-world experience and made connections for future career opportunities. Defense summer internships programs exist at myriad agencies including the Air Force Research Lab, the Army Research Lab, the Naval Research Lab, the CIA, NASA, NSA, Sandia National Lab and others.  What they all have in common is a high interest in bringing in good students.

EECS undergraduate Dana Hemmingsen spent the summer with the radar group of the Army Research Lab in Adelphi, Md. Her work focused on millimeter wave radar phenomenology, specifically the collection, analysis and interpretation of Doppler induced by people performing a variety of actions. She also worked on the characterization of surface roughness using a laser distance scanner.

Ph.D. student John Jakabosky worked in the airborne radar group at MIT Lincoln Lab this summer. He was instrumental in the development of a new method to perform clutter mitigation for an airborne radar system, where clutter is the collection of ambient reflections from the environment that are often far more powerful than the desired signals reflected from moving targets.

Ph.D. student Cenk Sahin spent the summer at the Information Directorate of the Air Force Research Lab in Rome, N.Y. He worked with KU visiting faculty member Yang Yi on applications of neuromorphic computing to wireless communications. This form of non-traditional computing architecture has the potential to address many open problems that traditional computing approaches cannot solve. Sahin’s specific work focused on channel equalization for linear and nonlinear wideband mobile wireless channels.