Syed Abdullah Nauroze won the Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition, held at the International Microwave Symposium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from June 10-15, 2018. Nauroze is a Ph.D. student and Fulbright scholarship recipient in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and he is advised by Emmanouil M. (Manos) Tentzeris, who leads the ATHENA Lab and holds the Ken Byers Professorship in Flexible Electronics.

This is the second time in a row that Nauroze was selected as one of the finalists for the 3MT Competition at IMS. His presentation, “Origami: (Un)folding the future of engineering,” presents a novel method to realize fully inkjet-printed “4D" tunable frequency selective surfaces (FSSs) on paper that use origami folding techniques to transform an otherwise 2D structure into a complex 3D structure. This method achieves continuous range tunability in terms of bandwidth and frequency, while maintaining a high angle of incidence rejection by simply changing the shape of the FSS structure. This is a paradigm shift in achieving tunability for such structures, which traditionally require incorporation of complex electronics, MEMS structures, or specialized substrates that significantly limit their use in practical applications. Moreover, the proposed structures can be packed into very small spaces that can be deployed to full scale with a single degree of actuation. That is why origami-inspired structures are finding more applications in many different fields of engineering.

Highlights of Nauroze's ongoing research have been published in Proceedings of the IEEE, the IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium, and the IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation with support from National Science Foundation. To watch Nauroze’s winning presentation, please see the IMS 3MT video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0J5rvXiXM4&index=12&list=PLVXVJvkEq8EXJ3aaLLUV2KJRiW326nZQ5   

The 3MT Competition is designed for students and young professionals from all over the world, whose paper is accepted for either oral or interactive forum presentation at IMS, and they also indicate their desire to enter the competition upon submission of the paper. The main goal of the competition is to stimulate interest in a wide range of applications of microwave technology. Such information would help renew public interest in microwaves as a transformative technology that is rewarding both to those who study it, and to those whose daily lives benefit from incorporation of scientific developments in consumer products. 

This year, 129 such submissions were received by the 3MT Competition committee, out of which 21 were selected as finalists for the competition. The contestants were asked to present their work in three minutes or less using only a single static slide.