News

At last, a woman’s name on the nameplate

When Merel Verhoef, an Electrical Engineering student, heard last year that yet another area in her Faculty was going to be named after a man, she felt as though she had been slapped in the face.

A list of all 21 floors with their countless labs and lecture halls did not make her any happier – they all bore the names of men. She thought that it should not come as any surprise that so few women study or work in electrical engineering. Surely the open days do not help attract women if they do not recognise themselves in that environment?

Verhoef expressed her frustrations to llke Ercan,  Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering, who was on the point of claiming an as yet nameless space to set up her much desired Makerspace. This would be a space for extracurricular experiments and tryouts. Ercan says that it was perfect timing. “I was immediately able to do something about Merel’s frustrations.”

She came up with a plan to name a room in her building after a female scientist for the first time. The Computer Science building (building 28), also part of the faculty of EEMCS, already had a room named after Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani.

Read more; At last, a woman’s name on the nameplate - Delta (tudelft.nl)


BSc EE Student Samantha van Rijs wins the EDA Competition at SMACD 2023 Conference

Third year BSc EE Samantha van Rijs wins the Enhance Design Automation For Integrated Circuits And Systems (EDA) competition at the International Conference on Synthesis, Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Methods and Applications to Circuit Design (SMACD) with her paper on “Single-Electron-Transistor Compact Model for Spin-Qubit Readout.”​

The EDA competition is an opportunity for M.Sc. and Ph.D. students to compete with their best ideas, methodologies, flows and tools. Samantha is not only the very first BSc students to enter the competition, but she also wins a prize and joins the hall-of-fame in SMACD. This research is a part of Samahta’s Honours Programme Bachelor (HPB) thesis supervised by Ilke Ercan (EEE-ME) and Fabio Sebastiano (QCE) in collaboration with Andrei Vladimirescu (UC Berkeley).  

The winners of the EDA competition are selected based on the quality of the paper, of its presentation at the conference, and the live demonstration based on complexity, level of automation, designer interface, applicability of the proposal, robustness of the design solutions, and integration degree with commercial design suites and design methodologies.

 


Ilke Ercan (EEE group) receives an educational fellowship for 2023

The Delft Education Fellowship recognizes and appreciates the efforts of lecturers for educational innovation and boosts the impact on educational reform and development. Lecturers, Assistant professors, Associate professors and Full professors can become Education Fellow when they have made a visible, substantial and valuable contribution to the education of TU Delft. The Dean of each faculty nominates potential Fellows. Each year TU Delft appoints four new Education Fellows. Since 2016 26 Education Fellows have started their educational fellow project.

A TU Delft Education Fellow is appointed for a period of two years. They receive a two-year grant of €25,000 per year for educational purposes.


Electrical Engineering Education Section big winners of the Teacher of the Year Awards

On June 7, student association Christiaan Huygens organized their annual teacher of the year event. Ir. Egbert Bol (the chair of EEE section) won the Teacher of the Year Award for the EEMCS faculty. Ir. Bol was also named the Online Teacher of the Year for the EE Department. Dr. Ilke Ercan (EEE section) was selected the Best Teacher of the Year for the EE Department by student votes. She was followed by Dr. Ioan Lager (also EEE section) who came second place for the EE Department Teacher of the Year.

The Electrical Engineering Education Section is shared by the Department of Electrical and Sustainable Energy and the Department of Microelectronics, with a seizable contribution of the Department of Quantum Computing and Computer Engineering, but problem-solving falls under the Department of Microelectronics.

The primary task of the Section is to anchor the hands-on education in the Electrical Engineering curriculum. The BSc-EE program has a range of practicals, aimed at training the students in real-world problem solving skills, teamwork, and reporting. Throughout the first two years of the BSc, a path is followed from close-guided semi-practicals to distance-guided projects without a predefined outcome, in the form of so-called EPO projects. This then culminates in the third year in the BSc End Project, where teams of students work on a much more open-ended assignment (often defined by themselves as well).

The Section consists of a number of teaching staff, as well as a number of technical support staff. The Section is responsible for running the Tellegen Hall, where students work on the practicals.