Thank you for your interest in our group. We are currently looking for multiple creative, motivated and intelligent engineers who are interested in integrated RFIC, mm-Wave and THz systems to be prospective Ph.D. students for the Fall semester. Please contact the lab at iecs [at] virginia [dot] edu. Please note that during application seasons I get many emails from prospective students and don’t always have the time and ability to respond to each one personally. Even in cases when I am unable to respond, I will still keep your correspondence to review when I am evaluating applicants. The deadlines and application process can be found HERE.

Faculty and Staff

Steven M. Bowers

Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Steven M. Bowers received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA, in 2007, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in millimeter- wave circuits and systems from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, in 2009 and 2014, respectively.

Graduate Students

Yaobin Zhang

Yaobin Zhang graduated from the University of Virginia with his M.E. in Electrical Engineering in 2019. He started his Ph.D. program at the University of Virginia in 2020 as a member of IECS. He is currently working under Professor Steven M. Bowers and focusing on low-power wakeup receivers for IoT applications. His research interests include low power Analog and RF integrated circuits design.

Prerana Singaraju

Prerana Singaraju received her M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2015. She worked for Cadence design systems (2015 - 2017) in Virtuoso Front End, Custom IC design team, and at Intel Corporation (2017- 2020) in High-speed I/O design team. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Integrated Electromagnetics, Circuits and Systems Lab (IECS) at the University of Virginia. Her research interests include Electronic-Photonic Integration, and RF/Analog circuits for photonic applications.

Pedram Shirmohammadi

Pedram received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Shahid Beheshti University in 2019 and Master's degree from the University of Central Florida in 2021. He started his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in August 2021 as a member of IECS.  He is currently working under Professor Steven M. Bowers and focusing on designing low-power RF and mm-wave integrated circuits.

Samin Hanifi

Samin Hanifi received her bachelor's degree from Shahid Beheshti University in 2019 and received her master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Central Florida in 2021. She joined IECS to continue her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in 2021. She is currently working as a graduate researcher focusing on designing and implementation of mm-wave integrated circuits for photonic applications.

Jinhua Wang

Jinhua Wang received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2019, and 2022, respectively. He joined the IECS group in 2022 to pursue his Ph.D. degree. Under the supervision of Dr. Steven M. Bowers and co-advised by Dr. Benton H. Calhoun, his research interests include RFIC design and integrated power electronics.

Shadrach Kojo Sarpong

Shadrach Sarpong did his BSc in Electrical Engineering at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology(K.N.U.S.T) and graduated in 2021. He then served as a research and teaching assistant for a year at K.N.U.S.T. He started his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in August, 2022 as an IECS member. His research interest is in the field of RF and microwave integrated circuits for photonic application.

Adam Slater

Adam Slater received his B.S. degree from Western Washington University in 2015. Until 2022 he was a Lead Hardware Engineer at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories. In 2023 he received his M.S. in electrical engineering with a concentration in microelectronics from Washington State University and started his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia as a member of the Integrated Electromagnetics, Circuits, and Systems Laboratory. His research interests are generally in high-frequency analog integrated circuits with specific interests in photonic computing to reduce the power consumption of data centers and emerging millimeter-wave wireless beamforming systems to enable next generation communications, imaging, and radar.

Alumni

Jesse Moody

Jesse Moody received his B.S. degree from University of Southern Florida, USA, in 2014. He joined IECS at the University of Virginia in 2015 as a graduate researcher. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation, titled "exploration and development of near-zero power wake-up receivers for the IoE" in fall 2019. He is currently with Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, USA.

Robert Costanzo Jr.

Robert W Costanzo graduated from the University of Virginia, receiving his B.S. in 2014, his M.E. in 2016, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2021 while working under Professor Steven M. Bowers as part of the IECS group. He is currently working as a senior technical staff member in an RFIC team. His areas of research interest include digital and analog integrated circuits, RFICs, microwave photonic circuit design, wideband optical receivers, optical frequency synthesis (OFS), silicon photonic integrated circuit design, and photonically-driven electromagnetic radiators.

Pouyan Bassirian

Pouyan Bassirian received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran, in 2015, and his M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA, in 2017 and 2020, respectively. He continued his research in the IECS Lab as a postdoctoral research associate until June 2021. He is currently an R&D RFIC engineer at Keysight Technologies, Inc.

Pouyan was a recipient of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award in 2020. His areas of research interest include RF electronics and integrated circuits, integration of high frequency circuits and electromagnetic structures, microwave and antenna theory and their applications in various disciplines. His Ph.D. research was focused the design of temperature-robust, high-frequency, ultra-low-power wake-up receivers.

Anjana Dissanayake

Anjana Dissanayake graduated from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea, receiving his B.S. in 2015, his M.S. in 2017. He completed his Ph.D. at UVA from 2017 to 2021 under the guidance of Prof. Steven M. Bowers (IECS) and Prof. Benton H. Calhoun (RLP-VLSI). Anjana worked on near and sub microwatt wake-up receivers ranging from 434MHz to 5GHz during his time at UVA. Upon completion of the Ph.D., he joined the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), Switzerland. His primary research interests are ultra-low-power RFIC, mixed-mode circuit techniques, and aggressive duty-cycling schemes.

Jay Sheth

Jay R. Sheth received his A.S. degree in electrical engineering from Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale, VA, in 2013, and his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, in 2015. He joined IECS at the University of Virginia in 2016 as a graduate researcher. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled “Techniques for Design of Compact and Efficient Digital Doherty CMOS Power Amplifiers and Transmitters” in Fall of 2022. He is currently with Keysight Technologies, Colorado Springs, CO, as a Research and Development IC Engineer.

Linsheng Zhang

Linsheng Zhang received his B.S. degree in microelectronics science and engineering from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 2017, and his Ph.D. degree in electrical and engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA, in 2023. His Ph.D. thesis title is Micro-Watt Level Multi-GHz Wake-Up Receivers and THz DAT Power Amplifiers for Next-Generation Wireless Communication.

In the summer of 2021, he was a WSCE OTA intern at Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA, USA. He is currently a senior RFIC engineer with NXP USA, Inc., San Jose, CA, USA. His research interests include low-power wake-up receiver design for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, digital phase-locked loops, microwave power combiner, and power amplifier design.

Divya Duvvuri

Divya received her MS degree from International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India in 2016, and her Ph.D. degree from the University of Virginia in 2023. She has previously worked with Western Digital Corporation, Bangalore, India and with Maxim Integrated, Bangalore, India as a circuit engineer. Her current research interests are in low-power analog and RF circuit design.

Vinay lyer

Vinay lyer received his B.S. in electrical engineering (EE) from the Birla Institute Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani, Goa, India in 2012, his MS.(EE) from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA in 2014 and his Ph.D. degree (EE) from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA in 2023. His research interests include the design of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) and terahertz circuit design, including high-efficiency power amplifiers and multipliers, multimode antennas, and multi-functional integration across substrates. In the summer of 2020, he was an RFIC design intern at Skyworks Inc. involved in the architecture, transistor-level circuit design, and layout of advanced switches and couplers for multi-mode multi-band Tx-Rx Front End Module (FEM) integrated solutions. In 2023, he joined Nokia Corporation, New York City, NY, USA, where he works on integrated transceiver design for optical communications.

Xiaochuan Shen

Xiaochuan Shen received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Shijiazhuang Tiedao University in 2013. Then, he was a research assistant at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications until 2017. He joined IECS at the University of Virginia in 2017 and defended his Ph.D. dissertation, titled "Co-designed Interfaces between Photonic, Electronic, and Free-space Domains with Applications for Transmitters and Receivers" in 2023. Now, he is a senior RFIC engineer at Nokia. His research area includes RFIC, phononic IC, antenna, and microwave components.

Undergraduate Interns

Undergraduate Interns

Angelica Sunga

Afnan Alabdulwahab

Stephen Pancrazio

Brandon Brnich

Rawan Osman

Nathaniel Hersel

Frederick Scotti