CAC Hosts Visiting Research Associates from Spain and Germany

Michael Leigsnering and Eva Lagunas

The Center for Advanced Communications welcomed two international visitors for the spring semester who worked alongside the Center’s faculty researchers and graduate students on projects in the area of compressive sensing for radars.

Eva Lagunas, PhD student and Research Associate from the Technical University of Catalonia (Telecommunications Technological Center of Catalonia, or CTTC) in Barcelona, Spain, visited from November through April. Lagunas worked on an important problem in through-wall radar imaging technology where fast data acquisition should be achieved with compromising the imaging fidelity. From this research experience, she authored a journal paper for IEEEE Transactions of GeoScience and Remote Sensing, and two conference papers, which she will present this summer at the IEEEE Workshop on Sensor Array and Multidimensional Signal Processing and the International Conference on Information Science, Signal Processing and its Application. While at Villanova, Dr. Moeness Amin, Director of the CAC, served as Lagunas’ co-advisor (in Spain, she works with Dr. Montse Najar, Associate Researcher at CTTC).

Michael Leigsnering, PhD student and Research Associate from Darmstadt University of Technology, in Darmstadt, Germany, visited the CAC from March through May. He worked on the problem of exploiting scatterings and multipath of radar signals to improve target detection and recognition using reduced data measurements. Leigsnering is also authoring a journal paper based on his CAC research experience. Dr. Amin served as Leigsnering’s co-advisor along with Dr. Abdelhak Zoubir, Head of the Signal Processing Group at Darmstadt University.

Through Dr. Amin, the CAC enjoys a productive relationship with both Darmstadt University and CTTC. He has visited both campuses on several occasions and collaborated on research pertaining to the broad areas of signal processing. The CAC has also signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the Telecommunications Technological Center of Catalonia.