IEEE Young Professionals Reception and Awards Presentation
Dr. Caitlyn Cooke received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering both from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2014 and 2016, respectively, and has recently completed her Ph.D. degree in August 2020 in electrical engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, focused on novel techniques for the reducing sensitivity degradation due to 1/f noise in InP HEMT based direct detection radiometers. She currently is an RF Design Engineer in NGC’s RF and Mixed Signals Department. Her research interests include submillimeter-wave MMIC design and packaging, and radiometry. She is the responsible design engineer on the NASA SMICES, SWIRP, and TWICE programs, which will demonstrate 118 GHz to 850 GHz direct detection radiometers, and a 240 GHz radar. She is also the responsible design engineer for the IRaST program, focused on improving the performance of sub-millimeter wave direct detection receivers. From 2014 to 2017, she was with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, involved with submillimeter-wave radiometers, including the IceCube, COSMIR, and WISM programs. She received the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship in 2016, for research on millimeter-wave monolithic microwave integrated circuits for radiometer front ends.
Dr. Alberto Canabal graduated from the University of Vigo with a Telecommunication Engineering degree in 2004 and with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from New Mexico State University in 2009. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in particle accelerator technology and then joined the University of Maine as a postdoc where he got involved with microwave acoustics and particularly with Surface-Acoustic-Wave (SAW) sensors. He later started his career in the semiconductor industry by joining TriQuint Semiconductor (now Qorvo) as an RF Designer. He currently is Director of Design Engineering for Qorvo in Apopka Florida, where he manages a group of over 60 engineers. Dr. Canabal has authored or co-authored about 30 papers, including peer-reviewed, conference proceedings and patents.
Mr. Luis Ledezma obtained a BSEE from Universidad de Carabobo (Venezuela) and an MSEE from the University of South Florida. He then worked as an RF power amplifier designer at Qorvo. He works as a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the areas of integrated microwave and optical technologies and is pursuing a doctoral degree at the California Institute of Technology in the area of nonlinear integrated photonics.
The IEEE Young Professionals (YP) group is delighted to join efforts with WAMICON 2020, and host the session "Career Opportunities for RF Engineers." In this session, professionals leaders of the MTT community from a broad spectrum of backgrounds will share their experiences and provide guidance on what the different options are for Young Professionals in the RF engineering field. This is intended to be a session with extensive interaction between the attendees and speakers.
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This year, several awards will be presented during the YP event. The awards include: "Best Paper of the Symposium," "The Best Student Paper," and "The Best Student Research Poster." Furthermore, we are happy to announce the creation of the "Young Professionals Best Paper Award," which will recognize the excellent work translated into a high-quality conference article from a Young Professional. The YP need to be listed as the first author to qualify for this award.