Jin invested as Y. T. Lo Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering

“I am proud to have a title attached to a name I have admired for many years,” said ECE Professor Jianming Jin during the investiture ceremony on April 7 in which he became the holder of the Y. T. Lo Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Jin’s remarks came toward the end of a ceremony in which his accomplishments and those of the late Professor Lo were celebrated by a number of speakers. ECE Department Head Andreas C Cangellaris provided a welcome and said that such investitures were opportunities to “recognize those who leave their stamp on our University.” He went on to note that the Y. T. Lo chair honors Professor Lo's legacy "by recognizing one of our faculty who follows in his footsteps."

ECE alumnus John Bruning (MSEE ’67, PhD ’69) provided a remembrance of Lo, his dissertation adviser, saying, “He gave me a great love of life and love of art and science.” ECE Professor Shun Lien Chuang talked about the accomplishments of his colleague Jin whom Chuang saw as “a great researcher and an outstanding teacher.”

Prior to bestowing the medal that accompanies the endowed chair, College of Engineering Dean Ilesanmi Adesida said, “When we talk in the college, we talk about leadership and impact. Jianming has proven to be a leader in the department and the college.”

Jin joined ECE in 1993. An expert in electromagnetics and optics, he has made contributions to the areas of computational electromagnetics, scattering and antenna analysis, electromagnetic compatibility, high-frequency circuit modeling and analysis, bioelectromagnetics, and magnetic resonance imaging. He has collaborated with defense industry closely and has successfully transferred some of his technologies for real-world applications. He currently serves as director for the Center for Computational Electromagnetics and the Electromagnetics Laboratory.

Jin has authored and co-authored over 200 papers in refereed journals and 20 book chapters. He has also authored or co-authored five books, one of which (The Finite Element Method in Electromagnetics) has gone into a second edition. He is the recipient of many awards, including the 1994 National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, the 1995 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and the 1999 Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society Valued Service Award.

He also received the 1997 Xerox Junior Research Award and the 2000 Xerox Senior Research Award presented by the College of Engineering at Illinois, and he was appointed as the first Henry Magnuski Outstanding Young Scholar in 1998 and later as a Sony Scholar in 2005. He regularly appears on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.

The chair is named in honor of ECE alumnus and faculty member Yuen Tze Lo (MSEE ’49, PhD ’52), who joined the department faculty in 1956. A prominent researcher in the Antenna Lab, Lo was also an innovative teacher who first introduced the theory of moments courses during the 1958-1959 academic year. Within a few years, his theory became widely used and highly successful. Lo invented the broadband television receiving antenna, and he developed the cavity model theory for microstrip patch antennas now used in the Global Positioning System. 

Lo served as director of the Electromagnetics Lab from 1982 to his retirement in 1990. He passed away in 2002.