Hua Wang has been awarded a prestigious Director’s Fellowship from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Wang is the first faculty member at Georgia Tech to receive this fellowship award from DARPA.

In 2018, Wang won the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), which aims to identify and engage rising stars in young researchers who are motivated to pursue high-risk, high-reward fundamental research by pairing them with DARPA program managers and providing them with funding for a two-year period. 

DARPA YFA winners are chosen in a wide range of research areas from engineering, physics, and chemistry to computer science and social science. The long-term goal of the DARPA YFA program is to develop the next generation of academic scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who will focus a significant portion of their career on U.S. Department of Defense and national security issues.

At the end of the initial two-year period, DARPA YFA awardees with exceptional technical achievements and leadership will be selected for the highly competitive DARPA Director’s Fellowship that provides additional funding and support for a third year to extend their risk-taking research explorations.

Wang was selected for his Director’s Fellowship by the DARPA Microsystems Technology Office that develops next-generation intelligent microelectronics systems and components. His research focuses on inventing fundamental circuit topologies and system architectures that will lead to a new class of load modulation power amplifiers with an unprecedented combination of bandwidth, energy efficiency, output power, and linearity. These fundamental amplifier topologies will be agnostic to process technologies and will eventually enable true “common-module front-ends” for reconfigurable transmitters and MIMO systems with mm-Wave to THz “full-spectrum access” for wireless communication, radar, imaging, and spectrum sensing applications.

"DARPA has a long history of making pivot investment in breakthrough innovations, not only in game-changing defense capabilities but also foundational technologies for our modern civilian society, such as the internet and miniaturized GPS receivers,” says Wang. “It is a great honor to be recognized by DARPA for my team’s research. Our mission is to invent new circuits and systems by exploring fundamental topologies. When we remove the conventional boundaries between devices, circuits, and electromagnetics, and consider everything holistically, interesting innovations will happen.”

As a member of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty since 2012, Wang is currently an associate professor and leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab. He has received multiple prestigious academic awards, including the ECE Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professorship 2014-2018, IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award in 2017, Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award in 2016, National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015, Roger P. Webb ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award in 2015, and Lockheed Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015, as well as many best paper awards in the field of solid-state circuits, systems, and microwave engineering. Wang is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society for 2018 and 2019.