Congratulations to Bahare Mohamadzade whose paper "A low profile, UWB Circular Patch Antenna with Monopole-Like Radiation Characteristics" won the best student paper award at the IEEE iWAT 2020 awards in Bucharest, Romania.
On winning the award, Mohamadzade says "I felt so excited and delighted. It was a great honour to receive this award from Professor Zhi Ning Chen and Professor Raj Mittra. The competition was difficult as 14 posters were nominated for this award from 88 accepted posters for this conference. Finally, two people won the award! This is when I realised that hard work and persistence in research always pay off."
The paper itself is about a simple low profile ultrawideband (UWB) antenna with monopole-like radiation patterns. UWB antennas with omnidirectional radiation are often desired in wireless sensor network applications in surveillance, structural-health monitoring in building structures, automation, Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications. Such antennas are also very interesting for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), where various sensing nodes distributed across the body can communicate with each other. It was the first UWB antenna with monopole-like radiation patterns reported in the open literature. This planar and simple antenna has a potential for fabrication based on the PDMS-conductive fabric composite technique due to its low profile and not having any extra components such as pins, feeding points, matching network and divider.
