Ahmad Hoorfar
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Villanova University, Villanova, PA 19085, USA
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Prof Ahmad Hoorfar is a professor and graduate chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the director of the Antenna Research Laboratory at Villanova University. He received his B.S. in electronics engineering from the University of Tehran and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research contributions over the last thirty-five years cover areas in electromagnetic field theory, numerical modeling and novel designs of multifunction printed and low-profile antennas, metamaterial media and surfaces, inverse scattering, microwave sensing and imaging, and stochastic optimization methods. He has been a pioneer in the development and application of evolutionary and global optimization algorithms in electromagnetics, development of electromagnetic-based techniques for through-the-wall radar imaging (TWRI) and ground penetrating radar (GPR), compressive sensing applied to GPR and TWRI, and the use of the mathematical concept of space-filling curves in design of electrically small antennas, RFID tags, artificial magnetic conductors, and metasurfaces.

Dr. Hoorfar is a life Fellow member of IEEE, a member of International Union of Radio Science (URSI) Commission B, and a member of the Franklin Institute Committee on Science and the Arts. He was the recipient of Villanova University’s Outstanding Faculty Research Scholar Award in 2007, and the recipient of the Philadelphia section ‘IEEE chapter of the year award' for his leadership in chairing the AP/MTT joint chapter in 1995. He was the general chair of the 12th and 13th Benjamin Franklin Symposia in Microwave and Antenna Technology held in 1994 and 1995, and co-organizer of the 22nd Antenna Measurement Technique Association (AMTA) Symposium in 2000, as well as a member of the organizing committee of the 2003 and 2018 IEEE International Microwave Symposia in Philadelphia. He has served on the review board of various IEEE and other technical publications and has also been on the technical program committees of numerous international symposia and conferences, including IEEE AP-S, IEEE MTT, IEEE Aerospace, IEEE Radio and Wireless, IEEE Radar Conference, International Union of Radio Science (URSI), and Progress in Electromagnetic Research symposia. Dr. Hoorfar spent his sabbatical leaves in 2002 and 2009 at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where he contributed to the development of a general optimization code for design of feed horns for NASA’s deep space communication network.

Titles of talks:

• Seeing Through Walls: An Electromagnetic Perspective (for general audience)
• Nature-inspired Optimization Techniques in Electromagnetics
• Electrodynamics of Space-filling Curves and their Antenna and Metamaterial Applications
• Real-Time and Sparse-Reconstructed Radar Imaging Through Stratified Media
• Advances in Inverse Profiling of Subsurface Dielectric Objects Using Stochastic Optimization Techniques