Prof. Levent Gürel is Named IEEE Distinguished Lecturer
Applications (JEMWA), and Progress in Electromagnetics Research (PIER).
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has elected Prof. Levent Gürel as a Distinguished Lecturer of the Antennas and Propagation Society for 2011-2013. With more than 400,000 members, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization. Each year, technical societies of IEEE choose groups of select individuals as Distinguished Lecturers who are engineering professionals leading their fields in new technical developments. During the next three years, Prof. Gürel is expected to share his expertise with researchers all over the world by delivering lectures on state-of-the-art topics such as parallel computing in electromagnetics, iterative and parallel solvers and preconditioners for extremely large matrix equations, and solutions to the world's largest integral-equation problems.
Prof. Levent Gürel, of the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE), is also a Fellow of IEEE. Elevation to the Fellow rank is one of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon an individual by the IEEE; less than 0.1 percent of all IEEE members worldwide are awarded this title every year. Prof. Gürel was named IEEE Fellow to recognize his extraordinary contributions to fast methods and algorithms for computational electromagnetics.
Prof. Gürel serves as the director of the Bilkent University Computational Electromagnetics Research Center (BiLCEM). Since 2006, BiLCEM researchers have been setting world records by solving extremely large integral-equation problems involving hundreds of millions of unknowns. The most recent record set by BiLCEM required solving 550,000,000x550,000,000 dense matrix equations. This superlative work is an outcome of a multidisciplinary study involving physical understanding of electromagnetics problems, developing novel parallelization strategies (computer science), constructing parallel clusters (computer architecture), and employing advanced mathematical methods for integral equations, fast solvers, iterative methods, preconditioners, and linear algebra. Computational science and parallel computing are not the only disciplines to benefit from such an incredible achievement; the ultimate goal is to apply this huge computational capability to find solutions to previously intractable physical, real-life, and scientific problems in important areas such as medical imaging, bioelectromagnetics, metamaterials, nanotechnology, radars, antennas, wireless communications, remote sensing, optics, and many other disciplines involving electromagnetic fields, acoustic waves, and even quantum physics.
Even before he was named an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, Prof. Gürel presented more than 30 invited talks all over the world. He has been invited to the U.S. State of Virginia to deliver the Plenary Address at the 2011 Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society (ACES) Conference in March.
Prof. Gürel's accomplishments are recognized in Turkey with two prestigious awards from TÜBA in 2002 and TÜBİTAK in 2003.
He is currently serving as an associate editor for Radio Science, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters (AWPL), Journal of Electromagnetic Waves and Applications (JEMWA), and Progress in Electromagnetics Research (PIER).