College of

Engineering, Architecture and Technology

NSF recently awarded a $500k grant to Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) assistant professor, John O’Hara, for his proposed project “CAREER: Taming the Terahertz for 6G Wireless Backhaul,” which will be conducted over a five-year period.

 

Prof. O’Hara joined OSU in August 2017 as part of ECE’s DC-to-light, next generation communications strategic initiative. Having been mentored by terahertz pioneer Dr. Daniel Grischkowsky and employed by Los Alamos National Laboratories, Dr. O’Hara was the ideal candidate to further develop ECE’s experimental capabilities in advanced wireless technologies. To date, Dr. O’Hara and his colleagues have built and acquired an impressive set of hardware assets for continuous-wave and short-pulse communication technologies. Such assets were in part funded by a previous NSF Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant. Few universities in the country have such capabilities.  

 

Dr. O’Hara’s project will leverage the existing abilities of his laboratory to explore system architectures and channel models needed for 6G communication systems. At the same time, he will conduct similar research that is being funded by NASA, AFOSR, and other NSF grants.

 

Per NSF, “The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.”