Jeffrey Nanzer, the Dennis P. Nyquist assistant professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has won the 2017 Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The objective of the YFA program is to identify and engage rising research stars in junior faculty positions at U.S. academic institutions.
Nanzer will use the two-year, $400,000 award to create technologies enabling separate, small wireless systems to collaborate as a single system.
“By wirelessly combining the operations of multiple systems into a coherent distributed array, dramatic improvements in capability can be gained in radar, remote sensing and communications applications,” said Nanzer. “Rather than redesigning new and larger systems when performance increases are needed, small and cheap nodes can simply be added to the distributed system, reducing cost and development time.
John Papapolymerou, MSU Foundation professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said this is a well-deserved honor for Nanzer.
“His groundbreaking work in the area of coherent distributed arrays will revolutionize future radar, communication and sensing systems and offer significant advantages for defense and security applications,” said Papapolymerou.
Nanzer joined MSU as a faculty member in 2016. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Michigan State and also received a master’s degree in and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.