Profs. Mikhail Belkin and Neal Hall Receive DARPA 2012 Young Faculty Awards

UT ECE professors Mikhail Belkin and Neal Hall have been named recipients of 2012 DARPA Young Faculty Awards. According to DARPA, "The objective of the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) program is to identify and engage rising research stars in junior faculty positions at U.S. academic institutions and expose them to Department of Defense needs as well as DARPA’s program development process.

Dr. Mikhail Belkin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Mikhail Belkin's current research interests include the development of novel quantum cascade lasers, giant optical nonlinearities in semiconductor nanostructures, mid-infrared and THz photonic and plasmonic systems for chemical sensing, and metamaterials in mid-infrared.

Dr. Neal Hall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Hall came to UT Austin from Silicon Audio, LLC, a high-tech venture he co-founded to commercialize state-of-the-art acoustic and seismic sensors with respect to high fidelity and small size. Dr. Hall served as principal investigator (PI) on several projects including the development of a MEMS-based seismometer for nuclear explosion monitoring (sponsored by DOE), and the development of low-cost, high-performance MEMS microphones that leverage optical-based motion detection principles (sponsored by NSF).