Lumumba "Lu" Harnett Receives NSF Graduate Fellowship to Pursue a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at KU

Lumumba "Lu" Harnett has been selected to receive an NSF graduate fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at KU. Harnett completed his undergraduate degree at Hampton University and arrived at KU in August 2014 on a University of Kansas Chancellor’s Doctoral Fellowship. His research focuses on the development of new signal processing approaches to separate radar and communication signals that reside in the same frequency band. Increasing crowding in the radio frequency (RF) spectrum has driven much interest in whether simultaneous spectrum sharing can be achieved (e.g. DARPA's recent SSPARC program). Hartnett’s approach is to pose the problem as one of interference cancellation to determine to what degree these rather different signals can be disentangled and still perform their intended role instead of effectively just jamming one another. Harnett is working in the world-renowned Radar Systems and Remote Sensing Lab (RSL) that celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2014 and has a long history of tackling difficult sensing problems.  "Lu is working on a tough problem, but one that has the potential to have a significant impact on how densely we can allow the RF spectrum to become. Right now we really don't know what that practical limit is,” said Shannon Blunt, professor electrical engineering and computer science and Hartnett’s adviser.