Engineer Zoya Popovic and economist Ehud Kalai, UC3M Honoris Causa doctors
6/27/22
The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) will award honorary doctorates to Zoya Popovic, an engineer from the University of Colorado (Boulder, USA), and Ehud Kalai, a mathematical economist from Northwestern University (Illinois, USA), for their outstanding professional and academic merits.
The investiture ceremony will take place on Tuesday 28th of June in the Aula Magna of the UC3M Getafe campus, with a speech by the President Juan Romo. During this event, medals will also be awarded to new UC3M doctors from the last two academic years.
The laudatio on Zoya Popovic will be given by the lecturer Luis Enrique García, from the University’s Department of Signal and Communications Theory. Ehud Kalai’s laudatio will be given by the lecturer José Luis Ferreira from the UC3M Department of Economics.
Honoris Causa Profiles
Zoya Popovic holds the Lockheed Martin Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder (USA), where she has been a Distinguished Research Professor since 2015. She received her bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Belgrade (Serbia) and her PhD from Caltech in California (USA). She has been a lecturer at the Technical University of Munich (Germany) or the Higher Institute of Aeronautics and Space (ISAE) in Toulouse (France), as well as holding a Chair of Excellence at UC3M during the 2018/19 academic year. She has graduated over 65 PhD students and currently advises 20 PhD students. Her research interests include high-efficiency power amplifiers and transmitters, high-performance microwave and millimetre-wave circuits for communications and radar, medical microwave applications, quantum sensing and metrology and wireless power. She has received two IEEE MTT Microwave Prizes for best scientific journal papers, the White House and US National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellow Award, the Issac Koga Gold Medal from the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), the Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) Research Award. She was elected as a foreign member of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006 and this year, 2022, she has become part of the US National Academy of Engineering. She has a physicist husband and three daughters.
Ehud Kalai is Professor Emeritus of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at Northwestern University. He is a prominent mathematical economist known for his contributions to game theory and its relation to economics, social choice, computer science and operations research. Born in Palestine in 1942, Ehud Kalai moved to the USA in 1963, where he received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 and a PhD, also in mathematics, from Cornell University in 1972. After a period as an assistant lecturer at Tel Aviv University, he moved to Northwestern University, where he held the James J. O’Connor Chair of Decision and Game Sciences from 1975 to 2017. In addition, Professor Kalai held the Oskar Morgenstern Chair at New York University in 1991. Throughout his career, Professor Kalai has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Sherman Fairchild Prize from the California Institute of Technology in 1993 and the status of Doctor Honoris Causa from the Paris Dauphine University in 2010. In addition, in 2013 he received the Game Theory Society prize for work on the interrelationship between Game Theory and Computer Science, which bears his name (Kalai Prize) and in 2017, the Israel Science Foundation organised a seminar in his honour at Tel Aviv University. Professor Kalai has published more than 60 papers in high impact journals, as well as 14 chapters in books, which have obtained more than 10,000 citations. His academic contributions can be divided into different fields: cooperative and non-cooperative game theory, social choice theory and computer science.
