Apoorva Gade, Robert Margolies, and Jianxun Zhu receive the EE MS Award of Excellence

The EE MS Award of Excellence is awarded annually by the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University to fewer than 3% of the candidates for the M.S. degree to recognize outstanding achievement. This year, out of the 6 awards given out by the Department, 3 were awarded to students affiliated with the EnHANTs project.

Apoorva Gade has been involved in the EnHANTs project in the Summer of 2011. Her EnHANTs research project focused on the design of energy efficient data collection protocols for robust and scalable wireless communications in urban search and rescue applications. Apoorva is currently a software engineer at Oracle in Boston, MA.

Robert Margolies is a Ph.D. Candidate advised by Professor Gil Zussman. Joining the EnHANTs project in Spring 2011, he has been focusing on developing an energy efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for the UWB-IR physical layer, and on the hardware and software integration for the EnHANT prototype. Robert is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and is a a co-recipient of the 2011 ACM SenSys Best Student Demo Award.

Jianxun Zhu is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Columbia Integrated Systems Laboratory (CISL), under the advising of Professor Peter Kinget. His work on EnHANTs began in Spring 2011 and has been focused on the design, testing, and tuning of the UWB transceiver board which integrates the UWB chipset with the rest of the prototype. Jianxun is a co-recipient of the 2011 ACM SenSys Best Student Demo Award.