Former KU EECS Doctoral Student Receives International Recognition for “Best Dissertation” Award in Radar Technology

Christian Jones, who successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on “Robust and Efficient Structure-Based Radar Receive Processing” in December 2023, was announced the recipient of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society’s (AESS) Robert T. Hill Best Dissertation Award. The award recognizes an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the Field of Interest of AESS and is predominantly represented by radar research. Its purpose is to grant international recognition for the most outstanding doctoral dissertation by an IEEE/AESS member.

Jones’ dissertation work involves the development of efficient waveform-agile processing techniques and robustness measures using structure-based modeling of radar receive measurements. This work expands on content published in the 2021 IEEE Radar Conference which was awarded first place at the student paper competition. His finalized dissertation leverages techniques from that publication with expanded analysis and additional algorithmic development.

“I have thoroughly enjoyed watching Christian’s ideation process, which generally began with a deep dive into optimization theory and followed closely by figuring out how to experimentally test some new idea in hardware,” Shannon Blunt, center director of KU’s Radar Systems Laboratory (RSL). “It felt like most of my job as advisor was to provide some light oversight and otherwise just get out of the way.”

Jones is currently with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. While at KU, he was affiliated with RSL within the Institute for Information Sciences (I2S) , where his research entailed various aspects of radar signal processing and experimental demonstration.

Jones will be presented his award at the IEEE International Radar Conference in Atlanta this May.