Baris Volkan Gurses, a spring 2020 graduate of Georgia Tech, has received a 2020-2021 Tau Beta Pi Fellowship. Tau Beta Pi, the only engineering honor society that represents the entire engineering profession, awards these fellowships annually for a year of graduate study. Gurses graduated with his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering and will attend Caltech in the fall to pursue his Ph.D. 

Gurses worked on four different research projects while he was a student in Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). His two most recent projects were done with ECE Associate Professor Morris Cohen, who leads the Low Frequency Radio Group, and ECE Associate Professor Hua Wang, who leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab. 

In the Low Frequency Radio Group, Gurses worked on developing an ultra-sensitive, broadband, low-frequency (LF) radio receiver to capture high-quality LF data and disseminate them to the entire radio science community. This novel receiver attains a sensitivity significantly better than the sensitivity of state-of-the-art receivers, not only paving the way for unprecedentedly-sensitive LF receiver networks, but also enabling novel applications such as near-field characterization of LF sources, imaging through conductive media, power grid cybersecurity, and accurate lightning geolocation. This receiver has been used in various projects, by other research groups, and has been deployed at two research sites for 24/7 real-time data collection. It is also being deployed worldwide to form the basis for the AWESOME network, a spearheading receiver network for global LF research.  

In the GEMS Lab, Gurses worked on a design methodology to devise frequency-reconfigurable rat-race hybrid couplers in the mm-wave/sub-terahertz (THz), or >100 gigahertz (GHz), range. This project was the first implementation of reconfigurable couplers on silicon at these frequencies. This proposed methodology will be a crucial element for the development of future adaptive wireless systems operating at sub-THz frequencies to address beyond-5G/6G challenges. 

While at Georgia Tech, Gurses took part in the Opportunity Research Scholars Program, where he worked with ECE Professor Gregory Durgin on a 24 GHz Semi-Passive RFID Tag and ECE Assistant Professor Lukas Graber on an Impulse Current Generator for Next-Generation Disconnect Switches. Gurses was also an undergraduate teaching assistant for ECE 3043 Circuits, Measurements, and Microelectronics Laboratory, and among his many extracurricular activities, he served as the editor-in-chief for The Tower, an interdisciplinary research journal for undergraduates.