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.
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