Ronald Marhefka named 2020 George Sinclair Award recipient at ESL annual awards

The Ohio State University’s ElectroScience Laboratory (ESL) named Dr. Ronald Marhefka as its 2020 George Sinclair Award recipient at its annual awards ceremony. The ESL Annual Awards Celebration highlights students, staff, researchers, and faculty members for their academic accomplishments, breakthrough research, and dedication to the ESL community. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the awards celebration was held virtually. 

George Sinclair Award

The most distinguished designation, the George Sinclair Award, was presented to Dr. Ronald Marhefka. The award recognizes an individual for outstanding technical contributions and service to ESL. 

Marhefka is internationally renowned for developing and applying high-frequency asymptotic solutions such as the Uniform Geometrical Theory of Diffraction, hybrid solutions, and other scattering techniques. He applied these methods to numerous practical antennas and scattering problems, including airborne, spacecraft, shipboard antenna analysis, and radar cross-section prediction.

A long time member of the ESL community, Marhefka earned his master’s (‘71) and doctoral (‘76) degrees in electrical engineering from Ohio State. He then served as a senior research scientist and adjunct professor. During his tenure at ESL, Marhefka was involved in the education of 24 graduate students. 

The following represents highlights from nominations made in support of Marhefka: 

• “Dr. Marhefka is well-known internationally for the development of high frequency asymptotic electromagnetic techniques that led to the development of a computer code-named “NEC-Basic Scattering Code”
• “Continually active in technical societies both as an author and volunteer bringing recognition to himself as well as the ElectroScience Laboratory”
• “Recipient of numerous awards and recognitions from professional societies”
• “Co-author of the world-wide distributed textbook on antennas with his co-author J.D. Kraus entitled, “Antennas, for All Applications’”
• “In the early 1990s, the U.S. Navy asked Dr. Marhefka to put together a team at Ohio State-ESL to develop a ship sized radome that was sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of an ocean-going shipboard environment”

The award was named in memory of Dr. George Sinclair, who exhibited exemplary standards in his own technical research and administrative leadership at the Antenna Laboratory (later renamed "ESL") which he formally founded in 1942.

ESL Annual Awards

The coronavirus pandemic has presented various disruptions to typical routines - from working remotely and hosting events on Zoom to social distancing and wearing masks. However, the ESL community continued to research, write, publish, recruit, and educate an exceptional class of graduates. Dr. Richard Ridgway, the director of ESL, highlighted this continuation of extraordinary accomplishments during a challenging time.

A selection of the achievements he mentioned are detailed below:

An Extraordinary Result
On November 23, 2020, using a digital television signal (WBNS at 515 MHz, BW=5.38 MHz) as a signal of opportunity, the ESL passive radar successfully tracked a general aviation aircraft a distance of 20 km in real-time with two-second updates. The passive radar, developed under a program with the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT), was installed on the roof of Ohio State’s Aerospace Research Center (ARC). 

An Extraordinary Collaboration
Under the direction of Professor Waleed Khalil, and the collaborative insights of research scientists Eslam Tawfik and Shane Smith, ESL and the University of Florida received funding for a third major program. The trio of programs aims to build trust into analog, digital, and mixed-signal microelectronic circuits and educate the workforce on these impactful technologies. 

An Extraordinary Research Site
Oguz Demir, a graduate research associate at ESL, spent several months in the Arctic, joining the National Science Foundation-funded expedition, Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC). He installed and monitored the ESL-developed ultra-wideband microwave radiometer that measures ice sheet temperatures and sea ice thickness. Read more

An Extraordinary Ending
On November 26, 2020, ESL’s CubeRRT officially became the first of NASA’s group of shoebox-sized constellation satellites launched in May 2018 to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Read more

A variety of other accolades were also recognized, including research awards, student awards, CERF three-minute thesis winners, and staff achievements. 

ESL presented annual awards to individuals in the following categories: 

2020 Best Dissertation
Peter John-Baptiste
“Advancing fully adaptive radar concepts for realtime parameter adaptation and decision making”

2020 Best Dissertation - Runner Up
Eric Loria
“Investigation of Coherent Reflections in GNSS-R using CYGNSS”

2020 Best Paper Award
Kendrick Henderson
“Circular-Polarized Metal-Only Reflectarray With Multi-Slot Elements”
IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, Vol. 68, No. 9, September 2020

2020 Best Paper Award - Runner Up
Behnam Ghassemiparvin
“Paraffin-Based Reconfigurable Antenna Operating at 100 GHz”
Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, Vol. 29, No. 5, October 2020

2020 Above and Beyond - Staff Award 
Spencer Smith

From his nomination: 
“Spencer’s efforts in helping ESL resume and continue operations amid the coronavirus pandemic were exemplary. His commitment to his job and the health and safety of the ESL community should be celebrated.”

2020 Above and Beyond - Researcher Award
Asimina Kiourti

From her nomination:
“Asimina encourages collaboration, not competition, and the friendships outside of work among our group members speak to this idea. She is also involved in many activities designed to provide support and mentorship for females of all ages in STEM. She recently helped to found the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Radio Science (USNC-URSI) Women in Radio Science Chapter.”

2020 Above and Beyond - Student Award 
Katrina Guido

From her nomination:
“For her service to the ESL and ECE community; as Chairperson of the ESL Student Committee (Fall 2019 – present); coordinates volunteer activities for new student recruitment; ECE New Graduate Student Team Leader (Fall 2020); CoolTech Girls program facilitator and her service as a reviewer to IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation and URSI Radio Science Letters”

2020 Test of Time Award
Joel Johnson

Awarded for the widely referenced 2015 paper:
Cognitive Radar Framework for Target Detection and Tracking
K. L. Bell, C. J. Baker, G. E. Smith, J. T. Johnson and M. Rangaswamy
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 1427-1439, Dec. 2015