Doctor Brent Nelson, a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, recently returned from a sabbatical in London, where he conducted research, developed his courses, and visited various sites around Europe.
He explained, “After stepping down as department chair last summer, I left on a four-month sabbatical in London. The purpose of the sabbatical was to give me some time to catch up on research and curriculum development after six years of being chair.”
London was an ideal spot for Doctor Nelson to take his sabbatical for several reasons, but the most important one was the nature of opportunities at Imperial College.
“I was a visiting professor at Imperial College in London, which is one of the top universities in Europe. I worked on my research and collaborated with faculty colleagues in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering department there.”
This collaboration included opportunities to give talks about BYU’s research there and at other universities across Europe. He also attended an international research conference in Ireland. These visits and conferences were a positive addition to his sabbatical.
“I chose London because Imperial College is arguably the very top university in the world in my field of research, which is FPGA design—configurable electronic circuits. My research is developing computer-aided design tools for novel uses of FPGA circuits. Computer-aided design tools are computer programs which help us as engineers design extremely complex electronic circuit designs.” Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (often called FPGAs) are circuits that can be programmed for a specific function after they are manufactured and shipped to the customer.
After coming home from his sabbatical, Doctor Nelson has continued his research and looks forward to teaching classes in the Computer Engineering field.
“Now that I have returned, I am back teaching graduate and undergraduate classes and I am totally excited to be more closely engaged with students than I was when I was department chair. “
Not only is he excited to be working with students, but he is excited to see how the department will grow in the coming semesters.
“As chair, I saw very strong growth in computer engineering during my tenure. I see it simply continuing on and I think the sky’s the limit because of the explosion in electronic and computing devices in our lives and in the world. We have a bright future!”
Doctor Brent Nelson received his PhD in computer science from the University of Utah in the field of VLSI CAD. He is highly involved in the professional community by serving on computing conference committees and other industry organizations.