Undergraduate students from Georgia Tech and Kennesaw State University (KSU) got the chance to share their research projects at the 2025 Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Opportunity Research Scholar's (ORS) Symposium on April 23, 2025.

ORS is an ECE undergraduate research program allowing students to participate in a long-term research project for two-consecutive semesters supervised by a graduate mentor and faculty advisor.The annual symposium is the culmination of ORS students’ research projects. 

This year the symposium was particularly special as it was held as part of IEEE’s Cyber-Physical Radio (CyPhyRa) Week.  The week featured  three IEEE-sponsored conferences hosted in Atlanta: the International Conference on Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), International Conference on Additively Manufactured Electronic Systems (AMES), and the International Conference on Digital Twins and Parallel Intelligence (DTPI).

A keynote lecture from University of Perugia Associate Professor Cristiano Tomassoni started the event. There was also a guest lecture from KSU assistant Professor Billy Kihei.

Thirty-three teams presented their research in the poster session. 

ORSS conference officials picked the first and second place Best Paper Winners for the symposium, while attendees selected the People’s Choice winner.

This year’s winners were:

Best Paper Award

Solving Communication Challenges with a Geodesic Dome Phased Array Antenna

(From left to right) Andrew Dorn, Benjamin Gantman, Lila Phonekeo, Marcus Agun;
Not pictured: Mentors - Hani Al-Jamal and Theodore Callis, Faculty Advisor: Manos Tentzeris

Second Place Paper Award (Best Paper Runner-up)

Semi-Passive RFID-Enabled Reconfigurable Antenna Array

(From left to right) Nealin Banerjee, Kevin McCollum, Veronica Mok, Femke Kovoor
Not pictured: Mentor: Kaitlyn Graves, Faculty Advisor: Greg Durgin

People's Choice Award

Investigating the Impact of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction and Current Pulse Shape on
Critical Current Density and Write Energy of SOT-MRAM Switching Dynamics

(From left to right) Md. Nahid Haque Shazon (Mentor), Andrew Chen, Alaric Pan, Naeim Mahjouri, Gabriel Nech
Not pictured: Faculty Advisor - Azad Naeemi

Since its establishment, over 1,000 students have participated in the ORS program, with nearly twice as many ORS  graduates going on to a career in academics than the general ECE population.

View the pictures from the event here and watch the award ceremony here.