Engineering achievements earn ASU professors fellow status


portrait of ASU associate professor Daniel Bliss

Outstanding accomplishments in engineering have earned Arizona State University professors Daniel Bliss and Yong-Hang Zhang honored status in one of the world’s most prominent professional organizations.

They are among colleagues selected as new fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Fellow is a distinction reserved for the most prestigious IEEE members and is conferred by the board of directors upon engineers with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in their field.

The total number of new fellows selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth of one percent of the total voting institute membership of approximately 400,000 from 160 countries.

Bliss is an associate professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, one of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

His research focuses on developing new capabilities and improved performance of wireless communications and remote sensing. He is working on better radar technology for the military and automobile industry, for example, and how to enable significantly higher phone and Wi-Fi data rates in congested environments, as well as dramatic reduction of power consumption of Wi-Fi routers (which are estimated to consume a significant fraction of a billion watts in the U.S., continuously).

Bliss also researches anticipatory medical analytics, finding ways to use technology to predict medical events that humans are not able to identify, such as epileptic seizures and possible postoperative complications of cardiac surgery patients

Zhang is a professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering and associate dean for research for the Fulton Schools of Engineering.

His research covers a broad area of optoelectronics, a branch of electronics that is responsible for innovations like electric eyes and photovoltaic (solar) power. Over the past nine years, Zhang and his research group have developed more than two dozen invention disclosures with applications in the aforementioned solar power industry, as well as optical communication and environmental monitoring and defense.