Y. T. Lo Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Yuen Tze Lo (MSEE ’49, PhD ’52) first set foot on the University of Illinois campus while passing through Urbana on his way to The Ohio State University. He had stopped to visit a friend who casually invited him to stay. Lo was quickly accepted into the electrical engineering graduate program.
In 1956, after spending several years working in industry, Lo was invited to rejoin the university as a faculty member and researcher in the Antenna Lab. During the 1958–1959 semester, Lo introduced the theory of moments as part of a course he taught in mathematical techniques for electromagnetics. Within a few years, his theory became widely used and highly successful.
Lo invented the broadband television receiving antenna, and he developed the cavity model theory for microstrip patch antennas now used in the Global Positioning System. He is also coauthor of a four-volume Antenna Handbook series of books that has been used by thousands of educators and students around the world.
Lo served as director of the Electromagnetics Lab from 1982 to his retirement in 1990. In 1986, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for inventions and innovative ideas that significantly advanced the theory and design of antennas and arrays. In 1993, he received the ECE Distinguished Alumni Award. In 1996, he received IEEE’s Antenna Propagation Society Distinguished Achievement Award for lifetime contributions. Lo passed away in 2002.
Faculty: Jianming Jin
Jianming Jin received his BS and MS degrees in applied physics from Nanjing University, Nanjing, China, in 1982 and 1984, respectively. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1989. After working as a senior scientist at Otsuka Electronics in Fort Collins, Colorado, Jin joined the University of Illinois in 1993.
Professor Jin has made contributions to the areas of computational electromagnetics, scattering and antenna analysis, electromagnetic compatibility, high-frequency circuit modeling and analysis, bioelectromagnetics, and magnetic resonance imaging. He was named by ISI as one of the world’s most cited authors in 2002. He has collaborated closely with defense and electronics industries and successfully transferred some of his technologies for real-world applications.
Professor Jin has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers in refereed journals and 20 book chapters and has presented more than 80 invited talks. He has also authored two popular textbooks, The Finite Element Method in Electromagnetics (Wiley, 2nd ed. 2002) and Electromagnetic Analysis and Design in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CRC, 1998), and co-authored Computation of Special Functions (Wiley, 1996), Fast and Efficient Algorithms in Computational Electromagnetics (Artech, 2001), and Finite Element Analysis of Antennas and Arrays (Wiley, 2008).
Professor Jin was elected a fellow of IEEE in 2000. He served as an associate editor and guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, Radio Science, Electromagnetics, Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, and Medical Physics. He was the symposium co-chairman and technical program chairman of the Annual Review of Progress in Applied Computational Electromagnetics in 1997 and 1998, respectively. He currently serves as director for the Center for Computational Electromagnetics and the Electromagnetics Laboratory.
Professor Jin was a recipient of the 1994 National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, the 1995 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and the 1999 Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society Valued Service Award. He also received the 1997 and 2000 Xerox Research Awards presented by the College of Engineering, and was appointed as the first Henry Magnuski Outstanding Young Scholar in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1998, and later as a Sony Scholar in 2005. He regularly appears on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.