Holly Cluff

For the past two weeks, the reopened Harvey’s Cafe has been blessing (or cursing) the Engineering Building with the smell of bacon, but that’s not the only change in the air. Throughout the building, doors remind visitors to wear face coverings, the floors direct them to stand six feet apart, and the bathroom sinks re-emphasize the timeless need to wash those hands. Not only does it look different, but for students and professors in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, it feels different. The classes have turned upside down.

The start of the academic year brings with it advancements, awards, and recognitions for outstanding faculty members. The university conference, which transpired the final week of August, honored this year’s worthy faculty and staff members on both university and college levels.

Every summer, bright young minds gather together on BYU campus to learn the secrets of engineering at Chip Camp. The department staffs full-time ECE students to lead these middle schoolers in exercises designed to open their eyes to the possibilities within the electrical and computer engineering fields. It’s three days of fun with educational undertones.

Dr. Steven Allen, PhD, described his undergraduate self as a bog-standard student with a fairly unremarkable track record, but the research professor - who joins the department faculty this fall - has built himself a considerably remarkable track record over the past ten years. He holds two degrees and ever-growing expertise in MRI technology and biomedical engineering.

Nanotechnology Journal will soon be publishing a research paper detailing the findings of several ECE students. The team, led by Dr. Aaron Hawkins and consisting of ECEn students Zach Walker, Tanner Wells, and Kalliyan Lay as well as collaborators Mohammad Sampad and Holger Schmidt from the UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering, created a new technique for fabricating membranes so thin that they measure their width exclusively in nanometers.

As June 2020 draws to a close, so does Professor Jim Archibald’s tenure of almost thirty-three years at BYU. On the last day of June 2020, Dr. Archibald officially retired.

According to the Google Scholar citation index, Dr. Randal W. Beard of BYU’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is the second-most-cited professor currently at BYU. Citations are an important measure of the impact of academic research.