James S. Hall won first place in a recent student paper competition at the 2011 Aircraft Airworthiness & Sustainment Conference, which was held April 18-21 in San Diego. Mr. Hall is a Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech.

Mr. Hall, who works in the Quantitative Ultrasonic Evaluation, Sensing, and Testing (QUEST) Laboratory, presented his work entitled, "Ultrasonic Guided Wave Imaging for Damage Characterization," at the conference. He is advised by ECE Professor Jennifer E. Michaels, who was a co-author on the paper, as was Paul Fromme of University College London.

This research is supported by the NASA Graduate Student Researchers Program in the form of a fellowship to Mr. Hall and by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.  His research, of which this paper is only a small part, has significantly pushed the state-of-the-art in the development of in situ ultrasonic methods for damage detection, localization, and characterization over large areas of critical structures.