Wong: Edward C. Jordan Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Professorship: Edward C. Jordan Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Edward C. Jordan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on December 31, 1910. He received a BS degree in 1934 and MS degree in 1936 from the University of Alberta, and a PhD from The Ohio State University in 1940. Upon completing his doctoral degree, he served one year as instructor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He returned to Ohio State University in 1941, where he was an instructor, assistant professor, and consultant to the Antenna Laboratory from 1941 to 1945. In 1945, he followed his mentor, William L. Everitt, to the University of Illinois.
At Illinois, Jordan served as associate professor from 1945 to 1947, professor from 1947 to 1979, director of the Radio Direction Finding Laboratory from 1946 to 1954, and director of the Antenna Laboratory from 1950 to 1954. In 1954, he was named department head, a role he served in for 25 years until his retirement in 1979. He led the department through a period of phenomenal growth.
Jordan authored or edited nine books and published numerous technical articles. His popular textbook, Electromagnetic Waves and Radiating Systems, was first published in 1950 by Prentice- Hall. A second edition, co-authored with K.G. Blamain, was published in 1968. At the time of his death, he was editing the eighth edition of Reference Data for Engineers: Radio Electronics, Computers, and Communications for Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc.
Jordan received many honors in his career. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He received the prestigious IEEE Education Medal and the Stanley H. Pierce Award at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also received the Alumni Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Engineering in 1986 from the College of Engineering, the George Sinclair Award from Ohio State University in 1988, and the Professional Achievement Award from the University of Alberta in 1988.
Jordan passed away on October 18, 1991.
Faculty: Martin D. F. Wong
Martin D.F. Wong received his B.Sc. degree in Mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1979 and his MS degree in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981. He obtained his PhD degree in computer science from Illinois in 1987.
In 1987 he joined the University of Texas at Austin as a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science. In 2002 he returned to Illinois as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
He has published nearly 400 technical papers and graduated more than 40 PhD students in the area of electronic design automation (EDA). He has won several best paper awards at premier EDA conferences. He received the 2000 IEEE CAD Transactions Best Paper Award for his work on interconnect optimization. His ICCAD-1994 paper on circuit partitioning was selected in 2002 as one of the Best-of-20-Years ICCAD papers. Another 12 of his papers were best paper award finalists. He recently won 1st Place at the ACM TAU-2012 power grid simulation software contest. He also supervised two PhD dissertations that won major best PhD dissertation awards (in 1999 and 2012).
Dr. Wong has served on many technical program committees of leading EDA conferences. He has also served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design, and ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems. In 2011, he received an ACM SIGDA Distinguished Service Award. He was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer in 2005 and 2006. He is a Fellow of IEEE.