SOCIETY NEWS

Dr. Alan Wilson Appointed Charles P. Reames Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at UCLA

Alan N. Willson, Jr., who has been on the UCLA faculty for 37 years, has just been named to the newly established Charles P. Reames Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering.  This appointment is the culmination of an extremely distinguished career, which includes a large number of major grants, prizes and awards for teaching and research achievements. He is, for example, the only researcher ever to have won two Baker Awards (given to the best paper across all fields in all IEEE Journals, Transactions and Magazines during the year of publication).

Dr. Willson got his undergraduate degree at Georgia Tech and his Ph.D. at Syracuse University. When he first arrived at UCLA in 1972, after a few years at Bell Labs, much of his research focused on electronic circuits, including mathematically-intensive theoretical work as well as investigations that yielded new insights into the building of very practical circuits. His and his students’ projects in this field have led to innovative means of predicting instability in circuits as well as new methods for computer-aided circuit design and analysis.

Dr. Willson’s research also encompasses the field of digital signal processing. Two new courses which he created in the 1970s brought the DSP field of specialization to UCLA for the first time. Among his and his students’ achievements in this field is a novel and much-improved way of implementing digital filters, which are used in many products to remove undesired frequencies from electronic signals, requiring a significantly reduced amount of hardware.

In recent years, Professor Willson has worked extensively on the design of direct digital frequency synthesizers (a specific type of digital oscillator). This research has led to a number of commercially successful products which have been produced by one of the world’s leading electronics manufacturers. In 1991, Professor Willson founded a small independent company, Pentomics, with a portfolio of patents that have proved quite valuable to industry.

Dr. Willson held the position of Assistant Dean for Graduate Studies from 1977 to 1981, and he served as Associate Dean of the Engineering School from 1989 to 2001. In 1984, he established the UCLA chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, the honor society for undergraduate electrical engineering students. The chapter recently celebrated its 25th anniversary; Professor Willson has continued to serve as faculty advisor since its inception.

Dr. Willson believes he owes much of his success to the many outstanding Ph.D. students he’s advised over the years. One is Henry Samueli, for whom the UCLA School of Engineering is named. Another is Charles Reames, whose generous endowment has established this chair. Still others are Richard Nielsen, Michael Green, John Adams, Alan Kwentus, Avi Madisetti, Arthur Torosyan, Ljiljana Trajkovic, Dengwei Fu, Byeong Lee and Sayeed Navid, to name just a few. The IEEE recently announced that Dr. Willson will be the recipient of the 2010 Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award with the following citation: “For exemplary teaching and curriculum development and for inspirational guidance of Ph.D. student research in the area of circuits and systems.”

He hopes he will continue to be worthy of that award and of the great honor of being the first holder of the Reames Chair.

Provided by Maciej Ogorzalek (Email: maciej@agh.edu.pl)