Speaker: Dr. Morris B. Cohen, Associate Professor, School of ECE

Title: Career directions in ECE   

Abstract: It’s an amazing time to be an ECE major. The need for ECE skills has expanded into places where it never existed before, like the auto industry. The need for data analytics permeates nearly every industry, new and traditional. But there are a lot of ways to make a contribution in your career, and though you shouldn’t at all feel obligated to define your career now, the purpose of this talk is to try and make sure you’ve heard of them. I’ll give you a brief overview of my career and research meandering but only brief, and the rest is to talk about where ECEs can and do go.

Speaker Bio: Morris Cohen received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2003 and 2010, respectively, and served as a research scientist until August 2013. From September 2012 until August 2013, Dr. Cohen was appointed as AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation.

In Fall 2013, he joined the faculty in the School of ECE. He is a winner of the NSF CAREER Award in 2017, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2015, and was chosen for the Santimay Basu Prize in 2014, an award given once per 3 years to an under-35 scientist by the International Union of Radio Science (URSI).

Dr. Cohen is interested in the natural electricity of the Earth, including lightning, the electrically charged upper atmosphere, and the radiation-filled space environment. He uses radio waves at low frequencies measured all around the world to understand them, and develops resulting practical applications. His group also works on novel techniques to generate low frequency waves with nonconventional electrically-short antennas. He is an author of more than 60 journal publications. He employs a “flipped classroom” model in some of his courses to make the experience more active and engaging.

He enjoys hiking, cooking, traveling, and building pizza ovens.

Research interests: 

• Radio wave emissions from lightning
• Advanced signal processing of low frequency radio data
• Global lightning geolocation, mapping, and characterization
• Low frequency radio waves in the upper atmosphere and in space
• Low frequency radio instrumentation
• `Space weather’ forecasting