Dr. Thomas Pratt, Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Electrical Engineering, began the academic year’s Renouard Lectures with a December 5 talk entitled, “Radio Frequency Physical Layer Research in Communications, Radar, and Sensing.” The lecture, held at 4 p.m. in the Hemmingson Center, reached across multiple disciplines, including radar, electronic warfare, wireless communications, remote sensing, optical fiber communications, power-line communications, civil, aerospace, hydrology and atmospheric sciences.
Dr. Pratt’s research is based on multiple-port radio frequency architectures and associated propagation features. A key phenomenon that his research group leveraged is termed polarization dispersion, which is an inherent feature of signals passing through multipath channels. Polarization dispersion is well known in optical communications, but is not well known in the wireless community.