Hong Tan named Keysight Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The Purdue Board of Trustees has approved a new named professorship for the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Known as the Keysight Professor in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the position is an acknowledgement of the positive relationship between Keysight Technologies, Inc. and Purdue ECE.
“Our partnership with Keysight has been critical to our students’ experience and success in the classroom,” said Dimitrios Peroulis, Purdue’s Michael and Katherine Birck Head and Reilly Professor, Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “In light of the fact that ECE is leading the way in the creation of a suite of innovative Purdue degrees and credentials in Semiconductors and Microelectronics, we are thrilled and very grateful to Keysight for their continued support.”
The professorship will be awarded for a term of five years, after which time Purdue and Keysight may renew the partnership.
Keysight manufactures electronics test and measurement equipment and software. Keysight's products include hardware and software for benchtop, modular, and field instruments such as oscilloscopes, multimeters, logic analyzers, signal generators, and much more. In addition, Keysight produces electronic design automation (EDA) software. The company serves the communications and industrial ecosystems, aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, semiconductor and general electronics markets.
Keysight has been a partner in Purdue ECE education and research for more than forty years, first as part of the Hewlett-Packard company, then as Agilent Technologies, and finally as Keysight. The company has donated or heavily subsidized instrumentation purchases, providing millions of dollars of instrumentation at a fraction of the cost. For over twenty years, Keysight has also been a supplier of high value electronic design and simulation software aimed at analog and radio frequency applications for education and research. The impact of Keysight on Purdue ECE is evident in any of our electronics labs.
Hong Z. Tan is the faculty member chosen for the Keysight professorship. Tan’s research focuses on haptic human-machine interfaces and haptic perception. She has published more than 160 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles in haptics research. Tan is known internationally as a leading expert on haptics psychophysics, taking a perception-based approach to solving engineering problems. She is frequently invited to give keynote speeches at international conferences and research institutions, educating a broad audience on haptics and its emerging applications in human computer interaction, robotics, medicine and education.
Tan was a recipient of the prestigious US National Science Foundation's Early Faculty Development (CAREER) Award. She was a Chinese National Natural Science Funds' Distinguished (Overseas) Young Scholar. In addition to serving on numerous program committees, Tan was a co-organizer (with Blake Hannaford) of the International Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems from 2003 to 2005. In 2006, Tan served as the Founding Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics (TCH). The TCH played a key role in launching the IEEE Transactions on Haptics (ToH) in 2008. Tan served as a ToH Associate Editor from the journal's birth to 2012, and received a Meritorious Service Award in 2012. From 2012-2015, Tan was the Editor-in-Chief of the World Haptics Conference Editorial Board, and co-chaired the World Haptics Conference with Ed Colgate in 2015. In 2017, Tan was elevated to IEEE Fellow for "contributions to wearable haptics."