As of August 2023, Professor Volakis has mentored nearly 110 Ph.D. students and postdocs, with 43 of them having received best paper awards at conferences and 25 becoming faculty members at academic institutions. Professor Volakis’ group is known for (1) contributions to small and metamaterial antennas, (2) introducing and establishing the finite element-boundary integral method as a mainstream technique in electromagnetics, (3) introducing electronic textiles, and (4) introducing popular diffraction coefficients for impedance/material edges and wedges. Leading texts in these areas were authored by Volakis and former students.

Through collaboration with mechanical and materials engineering faculty, he pioneered material design and a new class of patented photonic crystals for high-gain antennas. Also, his group realized the first carbon nanotube and electronic-textile antennas, having nearly equivalent performance to traditional rigid antennas. The flexibility of these technologies can open new directions in 3D flexible electronics (with particular impact on e-health applications). Through collaboration with the microfabrication faculty, he also contributed to an understanding of MEMS failure mechanisms based on asparity heating.

Please click on the names below to expand each person’s bio.

Professors

Elias Alwan, Assistant Professor
Dr. Elias Alwan is an Assistant Professor at FIU. He is leading visionary research in the areas of antennas and radio frequency (RF) systems with particular focus on ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems including UWB arrays, reduced hardware and power efficient communication back-ends, and millimeter-wave technologies for 5G applications. Specifically, his research involves the development of a new class of transceivers for high data rate secure communications, beamforming, and MIMO applications. Such systems will enable instantaneous transmission and reception over wide frequency bands using UWB arrays. Further, Dr. Alwan has been working on developing STAR-enabling high isolation RF front-ends to increase spectral efficiency across large bandwidths. This is very challenging considering the inherently narrowband nature of RF electronics. In addition, a major part of Dr. Alwan’s research is on secure communication. The goal is to improve interference mitigation schemes and multi-user detection techniques in austere environments using novel coding techniques. Alongside, Dr. Alwan is pursuing intensive research in millimeter wave systems which involves antenna arrays and RF front-ends design, fabrication, and packaging using latest state-of-the-art technologies.
Shubhendu Bhardwaj, Assistant Professor
Shubhendu finished his Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 2007 and is currently Assistant Professor at Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at FIU. Before that, he did his masters from University of California, LA and bachelors from Indian Institute of Technology, Dhanbad, India in 2012 and 2008, respectively. From 2008 to 2010, he was working for Samsung India Software Operations in Bangalore, India. His research interests are sub-mm-wave and terahertz electronics, primarily focused on novel antenna designs and phaseless measurement methods. He also has interests in computational methods for multiphysics modeling problems such as graphene and other 2D materials. Shubhendu is recipient of Early Career Scientist Award (URSI-Commission B) and Best student paper awards at conferences URSI-GASS-2017, iWat-2017 and AMTA-2015. At OSU, he was awarded with Luis B Vetter Award and Presidential Fellowship for academic excellence during his Ph.D. work.
Satheesh Bojja Venkatakrishnan, Research Assistant Professor
Satheesh Bojja Venkatakrishnan was born in Tiruchirappalli, India, in 1987. He received his B.Tech. degree in electronics and communication engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, in 2009, and graduated with his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Ohio State University (OSU), Columbus, OH, in 2017. Prior to this, he was a Scientist with DRDO, India from 2009 to 2013, working on the development and implementation of active electronic steerable antennas. He is currently employed as Post-Doctoral Researcher at Florida International University, since August 2017. His current research includes receiver design for communication circuits, RF systems, and digital signal processing using FPGAs. He is also working on Simultaneous Transmit and Receive System (STAR), to improve the spectral efficiency and data throughput.
Alexander Johnson, Research Assistant Professor
Alexander Johnson was born in Fernandina Beach, FL in 1994. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Western New England University, Springfield, MA in 2016 and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Ohio State University, Columbus, OH in 2017. He is currently a full time Ph.D. student at Florida International University with a concentration in antenna design. His present research includes wideband conformal antenna arrays for small platforms.

Researcher(s)

Abe Akhiyat
Bio not available.

Graduate Students and Research Assistants

Alexander Hovsepian
Bio not available
Alfredo Gonzalez
Bio not available
Asif Hassan
Bio not available.
Carolina Moncion
Bio not available.
Dieff Vital
Bio not available.
Kefayet Ullah
Bio not available.
Matt Nichols
Bio not available.
Maxence Carvalho
Bio not available.
Pawan Gaire
Bio not available.
Md. Rakibul Islam
Bio not available.
Md. Rakibur Rahman
Bio not available.
Md. Rayhan Khan
Bio not available.
Rimon Hokayem
Bio not available.

Undergraduate Students

Jorge Caripidis Troccola
Bio not available.
Maria Ovalle
Bio not available.
Malcolm Taaffe
Bio not available.