Faculty

Tang, Zhou, and Ricketts are Recipients of ECE Faculty Awards

By Charles Hall

It is our pleasure to announce that Wenyuan Tang, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering is the 2021 recipient of the R. Ray Bennet Faculty Fellow Award; and Huiyang Zhou and David Ricketts, professors of electrical and computer engineering are the joint recipients of the 2021 William F. Lane Outstanding Teaching Award.

The R. Ray Bennett Faculty Fellow Award provides support for high-achieving young faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State in pursuing their academic and cutting-edge research initiatives. The mother of Mr. R. Ray Bennett, Mrs. Alice B. Bennett, endowed a faculty fellowship for the department as a memorial to her son. This recognition is presented annually by the ECE Department to a single individual with a $40,000 cash award.

The William F. Lane Outstanding Teacher Award recognizes excellence in teaching or educational leadership in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The award is presented annually by ECE along with a certificate and cash award. Winners of the Lane Award are automatically nominated by ECE for the NC State Outstanding Teacher Award.



Tang has established a very active and productive research group since joining the Department in 2017. Since joining us he has received $4M ($1.2M his share) in funded projects, and he is presently advising 6 Ph.D. students. Since 2018 his group has published 25 refereed journal or conference papers, 21 of which were first-authored by his students.

Zhou consistently receives great classroom evaluations, and he does this with large classes. Other teaching contributions include developing ECE786 on Data Parallel Processors, and obtaining equipment donations from NVIDIA and AMD for labs for ECE786. He was also part of an NSF/IEEE-TCPP Curriculum Initiative on Parallel and Distributed Computing since 2011, and is making key contributions to the development of new courses in quantum computing.
Ricketts developed an original experiential learning course targeted at ECE seniors to learn the fundamentals of modern radio systems. He went on to develop a one-day radio system workshop that has been presented at 13 international conferences with up to 100 “students” each time. At each conference, he recruits and trains a group of volunteers who work with the students as they complete their projects. He developed many innovations to make this possible and satisfy safety requirements.