Four Ph.D. students from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering–Greg Droge, Zachary Lochner, Temi Olubanjo, and Carol Young–have been awarded fellowships from the Achievement Rewards for Academic Scientists (ARCS) program.

The ARCS Scholars Awards recognize outstanding doctoral students who have records of past achievement and who show exceptional promise of making a significant contribution to the worldwide advancement of science and technology.

The research performed by Greg Droge and Carol Young is in the general area of robotics and unmanned systems, and they are advised by ECE Professor Magnus Egerstedt and ECE Assistant Professor Fumin Zhang, respectively.  Mr. Droge works on distributed decision making, with a focus on controlling modular robots, and has been a part of Dr. Egerstedt's group, the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab, for three years. Ms. Young is involved in making unmanned systems trustworthy to be partnering with humans and has been a part of Dr. Zhang's group, the Lab for Autonomous Mobile Networks, for a year. 

Ms. Olubanjo first worked with the GT-Bionics Lab under the supervision of ECE Associate Professor Maysam Ghovanloo as a SURE Program Fellow in 2010 and then rejoined his group as a Ph.D. student earlier this summer. She now works on a wireless and wearable technology that can help patients to comply with taking their prescription medications as directed by their doctors.

Mr. Lochner is advised by ECE Professor Russ Dupuis and does research in the Center for Compound Semiconductors focused on high-efficiency and high-frequency electronics and ultraviolet laser diodes for bioagent detection. Mr. Lochner started as an M.S. student in Dr. Dupuis' group in 2007 and will complete his Ph.D. this year.