Events Listing

An Introduction To Investing In The Stock Markets

This seminar, a summarization of a five-part series, will offer a brief introduction to the reasons for personally investing in the equity markets, and to the mechanics of the investing process:  a) creating an account at a brokerage and an example of a brokerage to work with; b) understanding how investment newsletters work, an introduction to three specific newsletters with multi-decade track records, and how to select individual companies from their lists; c) the process of investing online through a brokerage; d) monitoring your portfolio online and with self-created spreadsheets; and e) an initial discussion of investing “traps and pitfalls” (“avoid being exploited!”). The one-hour discussion is intended to introduce the audience to this approach, but is not comprehensive enough to begin the process—the full series will give the attendees all of the tools that they will need to improve their financial security, patiently and safely, over a number of years.  Given sufficient audience interest, all five sessions can be presented at a later time.

About Professor Gilbert

Barry Gilbert is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Special-Purpose Processor Development Group at Mayo Clinic in Rochester MN, and an IEEE Life Fellow. He received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Purdue and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from U. Minnesota and Mayo Clinic.  Since 1970 his research interests have been in the design of hardware for specialized supercomputers.  His team has designed more than 450 integrated circuits, and has contributed to the development of more than two dozen special purpose computers, from chip-sized processors to cabinet-size supercomputers.  Barry grew up in an investment-oriented family, where he absorbed information regarding the stock markets and other forms of investments. Since 1975 he has been an active investor, and has developed a safe approach to investing that has worked well, which will be described briefly.

IEEE and WIE will co-host a study night with HKN Wednesday, December 7, from 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm in the ECE Learning Center and the IEEE Room. For those unfamiliar with HKN, it's an International Honor Society of Computer and Electrical Engineers, and our UMN student chapter is available for tutoring! Any ECE student of any year is welcome to come to hang out, study, or receive specific tutoring for related coursework. Some tutors will be available through discord. There will be bagels provided, so stop by for a snack! Please RSVP!

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is hosting our Senior Design Show tomorrow in cooperation with the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The show is Tuesday, December 6, from 2:30 to 5 PM in the Great Hall of Coffman Memorial Union. Please stop by as you are able during the show to support our seniors' efforts with their capstone projects. We hope to see you there!

Women in Engineering is excited to welcome Banner Engineering for an information session on Thursday, December 1 at 5:00 PM in room 3-230 Keller Hall. Hear from women engineers who work at Banner about what they do and the potential opportunities they have for UMN students! Dinner will be provided to those who attend, but you MUST RSVP! Please RSVP using the form. WIE hope to see you there!       

Huygens' Metasurfaces: Fundamentals and Applications

The interaction between an electromagnetic radiation and matter at the surface has long fascinated microwave and photonics scientists due to many interesting and useful phenomena ranging from light diffraction to surface plasmon polaritons excitations. In this talk, Dr. Kim will discuss how one can achieve extraordinary wave-manipulation capabilities beyond the ones observed in conventional materials or interfaces through so-called metasurfaces. Based on examples from his prior and ongoing research, Dr. Kim will discuss these metasurfaces from a brief historical perspective, as well as the current state-of-the-art and their potential applications in antenna and imaging applications.

About Professor Kim

Min Seok Kim received his B.A.Sc, M.A.Sc, and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2011, 2013, and 2019, respectively. From 2019 – 2021, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Professor George V. Eleftheriades, where he was engaged in the study of tunable Huygens’ metasurfaces and their applications in antenna engineering. In 2021, he joined the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of North Dakota as an Assistant Professor. His research interests include artificial electromagnetic structures (e.g., metamaterials, metasurfaces, electromagnetic band-gap materials, frequency-selective surfaces), antennas, wireless power transmission, and photonic circuits. His current research emphasizes on the use of machine-learning techniques to rapidly synthesize artificial electromagnetic structures for arbitrary and dynamic transformation of electromagnetic waves.

IEEE is glad to host another social on November 21st at 6:30 PM in the IEEE room for board games, dinner, and the chance to hang out with your fellow ECE peers! We will have games, both digital and analog. You will also get to meet as many members as you want and talk about school, hobbies, and much more. Excited to see you there.

 Please RSVP here.

Recommended for all ages

Join the Bell Museum at our November star party!  This time, all eyes are on Jupiter. Out on the Bell Museum roof deck, we’ll have our telescopes set up to observe Jupiter and some of our favorite winter deep space objects (weather dependent). Inside, we’ll have hands-on activities and a look at the research on Jupiter being done by University of Minnesota scientists.

Shattering Pre-Conceptions in Power Electronics

Sometimes progress ends before it even begins…When our point of departure begins within a pre-existing framework and we forget that it is only a model with many assumptions on what is possible. And perhaps history has distorted some of these and we think they are facts. In this seminar, I will introduce some unconventional schemas for overcoming pervasive limitations in (a) partial power processing in energy storage systems, (b) digital control of variable frequency power converters, (c) high-frequency current sensor feedback, and (d) multiple access wireless power transfer. I will discuss the hardware and models, the foundations of the theory, and share results from hardware and simulations.

About Professor Avestruz

Al-Thaddeus Avestruz is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, MI, USA. He received the SB degree in physics with electrical engineering, the SM and EE degrees, and the PhD degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. His research interests include the design, modeling, and control of high-performance power electronics in energy systems, and wireless power transfer for energy, mobility, medicine, and the Internet of Things. He is the chair of TC1: Control and Modeling of Power Electronics for the IEEE Power Electronics Society. He was the Technical Program Co-Chair of the 2021 IEEE Wireless Power Week (WoW) and is the General Chair of the 24th IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL) in 2023. He has over a decade of industry and entrepreneurial experience, and holds 12 issued U.S. patents. He was awarded the NSF CAREER in 2021.

Unique Insights into Magnetic Skyrmions Provided by Neutron Scattering

Magnetic skyrmions are chiral spin textures in-which the magnetic moments curl into a continuous, coplanar loop, bounded by moments in the out-of-plane direction. This configuration provides a non-trivial topology and quasiparticle qualities, including skyrmion dynamic modes. Hybrid skyrmions have shown the largest stability envelope, which includes room temperature and zero magnetic field, making them attractive for skyrmion spintronic devices. In the first part of this talk I will present the basic usage of small angle neutron scattering (SANS) in preparing an ordered lattice of hybrid skyrmions. Then, using grazing incidence SANS and neutron reflectometry, we elucidate the 3D structure of the skyrmions – which is important for both the toplogy and stability. In the third part, we use SANS as an in situ probe of the gigahertz skyrmion dynamics and discover a spin wave fractal network. Time permitting, I will discuss our recent work coupling skyrmions to superconducting vortices.

About Professor Dustin Gilbert

Dustin Gilbert is an Assistant Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department, at the University of Tennessee. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California in Davis in 2014 and was an NRC postdoctoral fellow at the NIST Center for Neutron Research before joining the faculty at the University of Tennessee in 2018. Prof. Gilbert conducts research on nanoscale systems with an emphasis on magnetic materials and phenomenon. This research has included hard drive materials, biomedical materials, magneto-ionic systems, biomedical materials, and high entropy alloys and oxides, as well as fundamental research into proximity effects and hysteretic reversal processes. Recently, Dr. Gilbert was awarded a DOE Early Career award to investigate chiral magnetic structures, including specifically magnetic skyrmions, using neutron and X-ray scattering.

The event will be a live presentation on Zoom to discuss common non-immigrant visas and green card options for international students, including recent developments. Sarah Peterson, a nationally-recognized immigration attorney based in Minneapolis with over 16 years of advanced employment-based immigration experience, will discuss strategies and answer questions.

This event will be held via Zoom on Thursday, November 10th, and it will include a live Question and Answer opportunity with Sarah who will be present to address some questions from the audience. This session will be recorded and shared on the ISSS website.