Gong receives IEEE Ultrasonics Early Career Investigation Award

Illinois ECE Associate Professor Songbin Gong, Intel Alumni Fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering, was recently awarded the IEEE Ultrasonics Early Career Investigator Award for his group's work with lithium niobate lamb wave microacoustic devices for radio frequency applications. These devices are typically found in cellphones to filter intended signals and reject unwanted signals.

Gong's group developed novel designs and microfabrication designs to improve the performance of the materials. Now the group is trying to commercialize their applications into the industry a few years from now. With their applications, cellphones will be equipped with wider bandwidths which will provide higher data rates for downloading videos, accessing the cloud, or using any AI algorithms.

The IEEE Ultrasonics Early Career Investigator Award recognizes the achievements of a researcher in the area of ultrasonics and its applications. This award is specific to those researchers in the early stages of their careers. It recognizes one awardee each year. 

In the past few years, Gong's research already earned him numerous awards. He is an active member of the T-UFFC community and is an Intel Alumni Fellow with the University of Illinois since 2016. Gong is also a recipient of the 2014 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award, the 2017 NASA Early Career Faculty Award, and the 2019 UIUC College of Engineering Dean's Award for Excellence in Research. 

Along with his students and postdocs, Gong received the Best Paper Awards from the 2017 and 2019 IEEE International Frequency Control Symposium, the 2018 International Ultrasonics Symposium, and won 2nd place in the Best Paper Competition at the 2018 IEEE International Microwave Symposium.

This award "validates the research and the research direction that we invested in ourselves for the past five to six years," said Gong. "We are  the leading group of this type of particular devices and we are very proud of the research outcomes that we have achieved."