Professor Jennifer Bernhard with some of her students who worked in the
Wireless Communications Laboratory. To Jennifer’s left is Andrea Dozet and to
her right are Christina Short and Eric Swanson.

Jennifer Bernhard Leaves UNH

by W.T. Miller III

This spring Jennifer Bernhard announced her decision to leave the ECE Department at UNH to accept a position as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois. Jennifer joined our department in the fall of 1995 as an Assistant Professor (see the Summer 1995 edition of Signals and Noise). She quickly earned the respect of the faculty and students alike. From the start, Jennifer was an active member in the Department’s Undergraduate Curriculum Committee. She played a central role in the development of our new first-semester freshman course EE401 "Perspectives in Electrical and Computer Engineering," which was first offered in the fall of 1996. She also developed and taught graduate level courses in antenna design and in wireless communications. From 1996 to 1998, she was the faculty advisor to the UNH Student Branch of the IEEE. She received the Tau Beta Pi Outstanding Departmental Teacher award in Electrical and Computer Engineering for both the 1996-97 and the 1997-98 academic years, and the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences Excellence in College Teaching award for the 1997-98 academic year.

Jennifer’s research at UNH focused upon the design of microstrip antennas for wireless computer networking applications. She developed a new Wireless Communication and Microwave Laboratory in Kingsbury Hall, and recruited a number of undergraduate and graduate students to participate in her research. She obtained external support for her research from the National Science Foundation, and published research results in journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, the Journal of Smart Materials and Structures and the Microwave and Optical Technology Letters.

With due credit to her many accomplishments in only a short time at UNH as a teacher and researcher; Jennifer will probably be missed most in the halls and classrooms of Kingsbury for her energy and enthusiasm. She looked upon departmental problems as challenges. She was innovative in the classroom, while at the same time supporting many traditional views about the core curriculum. She was a team player and listened to the views of others, but from her first semester on the faculty she was prepared to defend her own views in meetings when necessary.

Lest this sound too much like an obituary, something should be said of the future as well. Jennifer spent the 1998-99 academic year as a visiting faculty member at the University of Illinois, and will formally take on the position of Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering there in September. Her husband Bill is already a member of the faculty at the University of Illinois in the position of Assistant Professor of Political Science. This year Jennifer was awarded a NASA-ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship, and is spending the summer at the NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field, Cleveland, Ohio. At NASA, she is working on two related projects for space applications. The first is the development of frequency-tunable microstrip spiral antennas for frequencies above 12 GHz. The second is the development of a microstrip antenna with an integrated amplifier in the Ka band (27-40 GHz). The goals of both of these activities are to develop optimized designs that can be used as building blocks for active-reflector arrays or space-fed lens arrays.

The faculty, staff and students of the ECE Department are all sad to see Jennifer leave, but at the same time we wish Jennifer and Bill all the best in their new career opportunities.