Recent EECS Ph.D. Graduate Receives Prestigious National Research Council Associateship.


Recent EECS Ph.D. graduate Dr. Cenk Sahin has received a prestigious National Research Council (NRC) Associateship. This fellowship award will support his work at the Sensors Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) located on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The NRC comprises the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

His proposal “Embedding of Communication Symbols into Radar Waveforms” received high scores from the NRC selection committee and was also quite well received by researchers at AFRL. This work addresses the need to extract ever greater functionality out of the dwindling spectrum resources that are available and necessitates balancing between the conflicting requirements of communication and radar operation.  It will draw from his strong background in communication systems and information theory developed while working with his co-advisors, EECS Profs. Erik Perrins and Lingjia Liu in the KU Communications & Signal Processing Lab (CSPL), and from collaboration with EECS Prof. Shannon Blunt in the Radar Systems & Remote Sensing Lab (RSL). This award will support Dr. Sahin for up to 3 years while investigating this topic.

Dr. Braham Himed (IEEE Fellow), Technical Advisor of the RF Technology Branch of the Multispectral Sensing & Detection Division, Sensors Directorate at the AFRL said: “We're glad that Cenk is joining the RF Technology Branch." Dr. Sahin received his BS ECE degree from the University of Missouri – Kansas City in 2008 followed by MSEE and Ph.D. EE degrees from the University of Kansas in 2012 and 2015, respectively. In the summer of 2015 he was a graduate student researcher with the AFRL Information Directorate in Rome, New York. His Ph.D. dissertation “On Fundamental Performance Limits of Delay-Sensitive Wireless Communications” recently won the 2016 Richard K. & Wilma S. Moore Award for Best Dissertation in the EECS Department. He will begin his appointment at AFRL in the summer of 2016.