Professors George Eleftheriades (ECE) and Yu Sun (MIE) have been elected as international members of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. (Photos submitted)
The National Academy of Engineering has more than 2,800 peer-elected members and international members, who are among the world’s most accomplished engineers
Professors George Eleftheriades (ECE) and Yu Sun (MIE) have been elected as international members of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The NAE provides engineering leadership in service to the United States and globally; its members rank among the world’s most accomplished engineers.
Eleftheriades is a pioneer in the field of metamaterials, which are artificial electromagnetic materials that can bend waves and process light in ways not found in nature. He has not only created new classes of metamaterials, but has also applied them to invent a whole range of groundbreaking electromagnetic devices. The applications for this technology are wide-ranging, and include sub-wavelength imaging for medical diagnostics, very small and efficient antennas for communications, wireless power transfer and light harvesting, and even “cloaking,” where incident waves are bent around an object in a way that renders it transparent.
Eleftheriades was also a trailblazer in the early development of metamaterial antennas. These antennas, with extremely wide-scan angle coverage, are used in wireless communications, defence systems, and collision avoidance automotive radar systems. For example, metamaterial antennas have been used to implement ground terminals for broadband internet through low-earth orbit satellites to provide internet access to remote and impoverished regions. Several innovations by Eleftheriades have been transferred to the commercial sector through collaborations with industrial partners such as Dell Canada, Google, Nortel, RIM, Intel, Qualcomm, Huawei Canada and Mitsubishi Electric.
Eleftheriades is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Royal Society of Canada, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He has received many of the most prestigious awards in his field, including the IEEE Electromagnetics Award, the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Distinguished Achievement Award, and the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Technical Field Award.
Sun has made seminal contributions to our ability to manipulate micro- and nanometer-sized objects, which is critical for both scientific discovery and industrial applications. He invented the world’s first fully closed-loop controlled robotic nanomanipulation system that can operate inside the high vacuum chamber of electron microscopes for automated single transistor probing and in-situ electromechanical materials testing. His nanomanipulation instruments have been licensed to industry for semiconductor failure analysis and materials testing, and are now used worldwide.
Sun has also applied his expertise in nano-instrumentation to make breakthroughs in robotic surgery at the cellular level. He developed the world’s first robotic system for performing precision surgery on single moving sperm and ovarian cells. His robotic cell surgery technique resulted in the first human robotic fertilization and has significantly improved clinical outcomes in infertility treatment. To tackle tumour surgery at the single-cell level, he spearheaded the development of magnetic cell manipulation instruments generating multi-modal magnetic fields to mechanically kill cancerous cells from the inside.
Sun is one of only a handful of Canadians to be elected to all three of the national academies — the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. He is also a fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and IEEE.
“On behalf of the faculty, congratulations to Professor Eleftheriades and Professor Sun on this significant recognition,” says Christopher Yip, Dean of U of T Engineering.
“Their election to the NAE demonstrates the international reputation of our faculty members and the global impact of their research.”
