The annual symposium allows undergraduate students to present their research projects and submit them as conference papers, giving them practical experience early in their academic careers.
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Students showcased their research projects at the 2026 Opportunity Research Scholars' (ORS) Symposium on May 1.
The program, housed in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), aims to provide students with practical, hands-on research opportunities, helping them to develop beyond the rigors of the academic curriculum and understand the practical applications of the concepts they learn in the classroom. ORS was recently named as the inaugural recipient of Georgia Tech’s Award for Excellence in High-Impact Practices and Experiential Learning.
Over the past two semesters (fall and spring), teams of three to five undergraduate students worked on the projects under the guidance of Ph.D. mentors. In total, students typically pour in over 200 hours on these projects.
The annual symposium is the culmination and celebration of this work.
“The ORS Symposium is the celebration of our students’ impressive learning journey,” ORS director Shanthi Rajaraman said. “For many of them, ORS is their first year-long research experience. It is gratifying to see their growth and accomplishments.”
This year, 14 teams participated in the program. The projects were:
- Dynamic, Distributed Wireless Power Transfer
- Towards Energy-efficient and compact SOT-MRAM
- GT Phone Home: Measuring Starlink NTN and Terrestrial Coexistence
- Probing and Visualization Framework for 2.5D/3D Chiplet System Simulation
- Design, Fabrication, and Measurement of 3D- Printedand MachineLearning Assisted Microwave Lens Structures
- 360-DegreeBeamsteering with Rotman Lenses
- Convergence criteria and design of SPICE plausible compact modeling framework
- Low-Power Wireless Communications & Identification (Going Batteryless)
- Unifying the ASHES Analog Computing Toolflow
- Safe Quadruped Navigation with Reinforcement Learning and Gaussian Splatting
- Synthesizing Field Programmable Analog Array (FPAA) in SKY130nm process
- Design, Modeling, and Synthesis of Emerging Amorphous Oxide Semiconductor-based Memories & Systems
- Robot Autonomous Mapping and Inspection
- Enriching the world of High-Level Synthesis: extended construction for HLSFactory
As part of the program, students submit their research papers to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ORSS, which awards first and second-place Best Paper Winners (submitted to the Atlanta track ORSS).
ORS students also showcase their posters the week before the symposium, where they vote (along with the mentors) to pick a People’s Choice Award for the best poster. Due to the high quality of the posters, this year, a second poster won the People’s Choice Honorable Mention.
Since being established in 2002, ORS has served over 1,000 students, who have worked on over 250 projects across a range of topics. The most recent cycle enrolled approximately 66 undergraduate students in 14 faculty-led projects, supported by 17 Ph.D. mentors and 11 faculty advisors.
All the pictures from the symposium can be viewed here.
This year’s winners were:
Best Paper Award
"Full-Duplex Pilot Beam-Rectifier Array for Space Solar Power"
(From Left to Right) Greg Durgin, Darrel Preble (Space Solar Power Institute), Amira Malave, Yufei Li, Daniel May, Carter Atkinson, Kaitlyn Graves
Mentored by Ph.D. Student Kaitlyn Graves in the Propagation Lab under Professor Greg Durgin
Best Paper Runner-up Award
"Design and Implementation of a Non-Focal Rotman Lens for 360° Beam Steering at 24 GHz"
(From Left to Right) Greg Durgin, Krishiv Aggarwal, Mansi Bhardwaj, Thawin Serivivatanavongse, Arnav Sharma, Nicholas Garber (Mentor)
Mentored by Ph.D. student Nicholas Garber under Professor Andrew Peterson
People’s Choice Award
"Unified Full-System Benchmarking Framework for 2.5D Chiplet Architectures with Real Workloads"
(From Left to Right) Greg Durgin, Davin Aoyama, Changrui Li, Ameen Shaikh, Danish Baig (Mentor), Jiho Kim (Mentor)
Mentored by Ph.D. student Jiho Kim in the Sharc Lab under Callie Hao and Ph.D. student Danish Baig under Muhannad Bakir.
People’s Choice Honorable Mention
"Measuring Starlink Low Earth Orbit and Terrestrial Coexistence for Improved PNT"
(Frome Left to Right) Greg Durgin, Advaith Pillai, Aamir Syed, Shreya Iyer, Ryan Elchahal, Mia Villavicencio, Neil Cameron Matson (Mentor)
Mentored by Ph.D. Student Cameron Matson, in the MARGA lab under Professor Karthikeyan Sundaresan
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