EE Alumnus to Join UIUC Faculty

June 20, 2016

Jin Zhou, a graduating doctoral candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, will be joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as a tenure-track assistant professor beginning in January 2017. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is regarded as a world-leading institution for engineering - the College of Engineering is ranked 7th at the graduate level in 2016 by U.S. News and World Report, with electrical/electronic/communications engineering being ranked tied for 4th. Jin Zhou has worked under the advisement of Professor Harish Krishnaswamy while at Columbia.

Jin received his B.S. degree in electronics science and technology from Wuhan University, Wuhan, China, in 2008, and the M.S. degree in microelectronics from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, in 2011. From 2011 to 2012, he worked as an RF integrated circuits design engineer with MediaTek Singapore.

The focus of Jin's doctoral research has been integrated radios for full-duplex (FD) wireless. FD wireless - simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency - has the potential to significantly improve wireless network performance. However, the biggest challenge associated with FD wireless is the tremendous amount of transmitter self-interference right on top of the desired signal. Jin’s doctoral research has made three important contributions towards the realization of self-interference- cancelling FD radios using integrated circuit (IC) technology, including elimination of the noise and distortion of the cancellation circuitry, enhancing cancellation bandwidth, and performing joint RF, analog, and digital cancellation to achieve cancellation with nearly one part-per- billion accuracy. As first author, Jin has published two IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC) papers and three IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) papers based on his doctoral research. JSSC and ISSCC are the most prestigious venues for journal and conference publication in the integrated circuits area. 

Jin is the recipient of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Solid-State and Integrated Circuit Technology Excellent Student Paper Award, the 2015-2016 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award, and the 2015-2016 Jury Award from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. Jin also won the 2015-2016 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship in collaboration with Jelena Marasevic for their interdisciplinary research proposal related to FD wireless. This interdisciplinary research has formed the basis for the FlexICoN project at Columbia University.