One of the more important events of this academic year was recruitment of a new faculty member for the Department. You may remember from last year's Signals and Noise that Dr. Joseph Murdoch retired at the end of the last academic year, followed this year by Dr. Albert Frost (see related article in this edition). As the result of the general down-sizing at UNH, one of the two open positions was eliminated but we were given the go ahead last fall to advertise and interview to fill the second position. We had previously decided to search specifically for someone to augment department activities in the general area of data communications. The various aspects of wired and wireless data communications are among the fastest growing areas of the electrical engineering industry and many of our undergraduate and graduate students find related employment upon leaving UNH. We received resumes from 101 individuals during the search process, of which we invited the 4 most outstanding candidates for campus interviews. Our final selection was Dr. Jennifer T. Bernhard, a recent PhD graduate from Duke University. Fortunately, Jennifer liked UNH as well and accepted our offer last spring.

Jennifer grew up in a small southern Adirondack town in central New York. She graduated from Cornell University in 1988 with a BS in Electrical Engineering. While at Cornell, she was a McMullen Dean's Scholar and participated in the Engineering Co-op Program, working at IBM Federal Systems Division.

Jennifer earned the MS (1990) and PhD (1994) degrees from Duke University. Her dissertation research investigated the characteristics of dielectric slab-loaded waveguides and resonant cavities that provide uniform electromagnetic field distributions for use in laboratory testing, medical treatments, and industrial processes. During her first two years at Duke, Jennifer served as a teaching and laboratory assistant for electrical circuits and electromagnetics courses. In 1990, she was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

Jennifer is a member of IEEE, Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Sigma Xi. At Duke, she was also an organizing member of the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Project, a graduate student-run organization designed to improve the climate for graduate women in the sciences.

Jennifer's professional experience includes work as a research engineer with Avnet Development Labs and, more recently, as a consultant with Wireless Technology Associates. This past year, she held the post-doctoral position of research associate with the Departments of Radiation Oncology and Electrical Engineering at Duke University, where she developed RF and microwave circuitry for simultaneous hyperthermia (treatment of cancer with microwaves) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) thermometry.

At UNH, Jennifer plans to carry out research in the electromagnetic aspects of wireless data communications as well as electromagnetics for other industrial and medical applications. She will be teaching Electrical Networks (EE 645) during the fall '95 semester, and plans to teach both graduate and undergraduate courses in circuits and electromagnetics in the future.

Jennifer and her husband, Bill, a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Duke University, are looking forward to living in the Northeast again. They are particularly excited about being able to ski regularly. In her spare time, Jennifer enjoys playing squash and golf, following baseball and basketball, reading mysteries and historical fiction, and playing with her cat, Ogo.

Jennifer will be joining the Department as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering in August. This spring she was also selected by the UNH Faculty Awards Committee to receive the Class of 1994 Professorship, which provides professional development support to an outstanding new faculty member for a period of three years. The Department is looking forward to having a new face in the Kingsbury Hall corridors (our last new faculty hire was Dr. Michael Carter, who joined the ECE Department in 1987). Her interest and expertise in the electromagnetics of portable wireless data communications will add a new dimension to our undergraduate and graduate programs.