Electrical Engineering Ph.D. Student Paper Receives First Place at 2017 IEEE Radar Conference

EECS Ph.D. student Patrick McCormick received 1st place in the student paper contest at the 2017 IEEE Radar Conference in Seattle. This is the premier conference devoted to advancing radar technology. His paper was selected from 124 student papers submitted from around the world. Five submissions were selected as finalists and students presented their work to a panel of judges.  McCormick’s paper was titled “Simultaneous Radar and Communications Emissions from a Common Aperture, Part I: Theory.” It had a companion paper that provided the experimental demonstration of the approach using the BEEMER radar testbed at the Air Force Research Lab. While others have previously explored theoretical approaches to emitting simultaneous radar and communication signals from the same antenna array, this is the first paper to develop the theory in a way that permitted it to be physically accomplished in hardware. Further, the approach McCormick developed, named Far-Field Radiated Emission Design (FFRED), leveraged the notion of multiple-input multiple-output radar in a novel way, whereby each antenna element is driven by a unique waveform, with the set of such emissions combining in the far-field of the antenna to form the radar and communication beams. The second place prize went to a student from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Third place went to a student from Temple University in Philadelphia. McCormick also won third place at last year’s IEEE Radar Conference. McCormick works in the KU Radar Systems & Remote Sensing Lab that has garnered a world-renowned reputation for innovations in radar since its inception in 1964. His graduate advisor is IEEE Fellow Professor Shannon Blunt.