Meet Dr. Stephen Bass

Advisor: Dr. Jennifer Bernhard

Institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 

Bio:  Stephen Bass is a postdoctoral student who works at the University of Illinois to develop novel antenna designs that will improve the limits of current antennas. After spending half a decade working in this area, Stephen believes improving these bounds could change the design models and lead to an improvement in small antennas and their rapid design.

Stephen has had the opportunity to present at several conferences, including the Antenna Symposium at Allerton and ICARS, and has been able to publish articles on antenna modeling. Stephen holds a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Oklahoma and plans to continue his academic career as research faculty at a university after the postdoc.

Abstract:  Nearly all contemporary antenna systems are linear time-invariant (LTI) devices, and as such are governed by strict bounds on their performance relative to their electrical size, e.g., the Chu bound. Because of this, the use of electrically small antennas (ESAs) is limited. However, by using non-linear or time-varying (non-LTI) structures, ESA performance may be able to be increased beyond these limits. If non-LTI antenna architectures can indeed achieve better performance than similarly sized LTI antennas, it will represent a paradigm shift in applied electromagnetics, potentially revolutionizing applications of antennas from communications to sensing. To identify the practical advantages of non-LTI antenna systems, efficient analytical and computational methods must be developed. To this end, hybridizing the classical LTI MoM with non-LTI simulation techniques will provide an efficient computational system that provides insight into non-LTI antenna design.