COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Two faculty members in Texas A&M University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as researchers in the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, have been elected to the rank of Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Professor Robert D. Nevels has been cited for "contributions to electromagnetic field theory for quantum mechanics," and associate professor Zixiang Xiong, for "contributions to source and channel coding." With the addition of Nevels and Xiong, 18 faculty members in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have reached the rank of Fellow. This is considered a significant honor because the number of IEEE members who may advance to Fellow in one year is 0.10 percent of the total 320,000 membership. The IEEE Directory describes the honor as "one of unusual professional distinction conferred only by the [IEEE] Board of Directors upon a person of extraordinary qualifications and experience." To be considered, candidates must have made an outstanding contribution to the electrical and electronics profession. Nevels began working in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1978. During his tenure in the department, he has established the Electromagnetics and Microwave Laboratory and organized an undergraduate microwave course for which he wrote the lab manual and obtained equipment funding. Nevels was also the associate department head from 1998 to 2005. His other distinctions include the Texas A&M Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award; the IEEE Region 5 Outstanding Educator Award for 1997; the Clear Lake Council of Technical Societies Technical Educator of the Year in 1996; the Outstanding Professor Award from the IEEE Texas A&M Student Chapter in 1994 and 1998; and the Amoco Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1995. Nevels’ interest areas include mathematical and numerical techniques in electromagnetics, electromagnetic scattering, antennas, and waveguidance. He received his bachelor’s from the University of Kentucky in 1969, his master’s from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1974, and his Ph.D. from the University of Mississippi in 1979. Xiong began working in the department in 1999 after working at the University of Hawaii as an assistant professor. His research interests include image and video coding, adaptive quantization and fast algorithms, digital watermarking, joint source channel coding, internet video, lossless medical image compression, image recovery, image rendering, and color quantization. Xiong’s other recent honors include being named a TEES Fellow and a TEES Select Young Faculty; and receiving the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research and the United States Army Research Office, and the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. Xiong received his bachelor’s at Wuhan University in P.R. China, his master’s degrees at the University of Kansas and the Illinois Institute of Technology, and his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996.
