Emmanouil M. (Manos) Tentzeris and his colleagues won the third place prize at the Nokia Bell Labs Prize Competition, held on December 14 in Murray Hill, New Jersey at the worldwide headquarters of the company.

Tentzeris and his colleagues, Apostolos Georgiadis and George Goussetis, both faculty members at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, were recognized for their project, “3D/Inkjet Printed Millimeter Wave Systems.” This is the first additive manufacturing approach combining 3D and inkjet printing up to 100 GHz that could be used in applications such as communications, sensing, energy transfer and harvesting, Internet of Things, autonomous cars, and smart skins. This technique would enable wireless operability in frequencies and data rates 10-40 times higher than that of previous state-of-the-art printed devices, while reducing the fabrication cost by 5-10 times.

Tentzeris is the Ken Byers Professor in Flexible Electronics at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where he has been a faculty member since 1998. He also leads the ATHENA Lab, which is based in the School of ECE. 

This year’s winners were selected from among seven finalists who were drawn from a total field of over 250 proposals from 41 countries. All of the prize winners demonstrated game-changing ideas in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics with the potential to improve the future of the human experience by ten-fold. In addition to their cash prizes, the winners will also be able to collaborate with Nokia Bell Labs researchers on the further development of their ideas.