Electrical engineering professional association honors professor, dean

LAWRENCE — University of Kansas Electrical Engineering Professor Shannon Blunt and School of Engineering Dean Michael Branicky were recently named Fellows by the prestigious professional association the Institute of Electrical Electronics and Engineers (IEEE).

Following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for elevation to IEEE Fellow. Less than 0.1 percent of voting members are selected each year for Fellow status. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

Blunt serves as the director of the KU Radar Systems and Remote Sensing Laboratory. He is recognized for contributions to radar waveform diversity and design that significantly benefit current and future defense radar systems. Blunt is considered a world leader in the discipline of radar waveform diversity, having developed new classes of radar waveforms and subsequent receive processing to address complex interference environments, as well as the growing threat to radar spectrum resources. Blunt devised means with which to realize radar-embedded communications and experimentally demonstrated new radar capabilities that had previously been limited to the theoretical realm. 

Blunt received bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri in 1999, 2000 and 2002, respectively. From 2002 to 2005 he worked in the Radar Division of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and joined the the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science in 2005.

Dean Michael Branicky is recognized for contributions to switched and hybrid control systems. Such systems arise whenever one mixes computer control with physical dynamics, with examples ranging from computer disk drives to aircraft autopilots, robotic cars and smart power grids. Branicky’s main research area has been their modeling, analysis and control, with particular application to robotic motion planning and to feedback control over the Internet.

Branicky received bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical Engineering and applied physics from Case Western Reserve University in 1987 and 1990, respectively, and an Sc.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. He re-joined Case Western Reserve as an assistant professor in 1997, eventually rising to professor and chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, a position he held before joining KU in 2013.   

Branicky and Blunt join Victor Frost, Dan F. Servey Distinguished Professor and EECS department chair; Prasad Gogineni, Deane E. Ackers Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and James Rowland, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, as IEEE Fellows active in KU Engineering.

IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000 members in 160 countries, the IEEE is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics.