UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Bosung Kang, an electrical engineering postdoctoral researcher at Penn State, has won the Robert T. Hill Memorial Best Dissertation Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society (AESS).

He is the inaugural recipient of the award, which was established by the AESS to annually recognize candidates who have recently received a doctoral degree and have written an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the field of interest of the society.

Kang, who received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea, and his doctorate degree in electrical engineering from Penn State, under the guidance of his adviser, Vishal Monga, associate professor of electrical engineering, wrote his dissertation on radar signal processing in the real world.

“One of the most important objects of radar is to detect targets of our interest,” said Kang. “To accurately detect desired targets under interference and noise, it is required to estimate covariance matrix of disturbance in practice. Various powerful approaches and methods to estimate this covariance matrix under practical constraints are proposed in my dissertation.”

Kang will receive his award, which includes $1,000 and a plaque, in May at the 2016 IEEE Radar Conference in Philadelphia.