Prof Kenneth Tong

Professor of Antennas and Applied Electromagnetics

Dept of Electronic & Electrical Eng

Faculty of Engineering Science

Joined UCL: 1st Jan 2005

Research summary

My background is in applied electromagnetics, with strong expertise in antennas, microwaves and millimetre-waves. I have published 2 book chapters, 80+ peer reviewed journals and conference papers with 500+ citations. My Scopus h-index is 12. I am best known from my work on wideband and circularly polarised patch antennas. Early in 1994, I introduced the idea of using wideband patch antennas in mobile phones at APMC Japan, which is believed to be the first presentation of the subject in international conferences. I worked with Prof K. F. Lee, Life Fellow of IEEE, for developing an FDTD EM codes for the investigation of the ultra-wideband feature of U-slot microstrip antennas. This work has received 300+ citations. In 2005, I received the HKIE Transactions Prize on developing wideband coplanar patch antennas for millimetre-wave photonic integrations. I also regularly serve on the technical programme committees of major international conferences and am reviewers of the top international journals in the area. Recently, I extended my antenna research to medical applications. I have presented the first millimetre-wave antennas for achieving beamforming in Deep Brain Stimulation for Parkinson’s disease treatment at IEEE BioCAS2011.

In the Vodafone Booster Brolly project, we developed three unique wireless signal boosting devices for festival goers. They have been market tested at a musical festival in a rural area last summer. Huge positive feedback has been received from the public. I was interviewed by BBC and ABC. Moreover, it has been widely reported in other mass media, include Marie France magazine, IET E&T Magazine, newspapers (Guardian, Mail, Metro, Mirror) and hundreds of technology websites across the world. We are working a new project called GAMERS. The renewable energy powered GAMERS will resolve the insufficient mobile coverage problem caused by the poor national power grid in emerging countries. We are confident that this high impact and high profile project can greatly improve the quality of life in Africa, Middle-east and South-east Asia.

Teaching summary

I am the first academic member in the Department who have completed the Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. I am now a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK. As a major effort to improve learning and teaching, I realise the importance of laboratory work in engineering. The 3 mini-projects in second year have set up good examples and laid the foundations for the “Scenarios” which was later developed in the Department and highly cited by the Gordon-MIT report as the most highly-regarded UK application of engineering project based learning. In 2011, I shared my experimental base teaching approach with Prof P. Brennan and Dr C. Liu, we restructured 2 MSc courses by introducing laboratory modules. Course feedback forms reflect that the lab modules can help the students to grasp the abstractive theoretical concepts and turn them into tangible engineering design.

In 2007, I introduced online formal reporting system and Moodle for lab-book submission. In so doing, students and lecturers are no longer restricted by their locations, and such convenience has given the students much more time to focus on the actual lab work, and students’ progress can also be continuously monitored. To underpin students’ multi-disciplinary research interest in engineering, I supervised a group of 8 MEng project students to design and build a compact unmanned air vehicle (UAV) from scratch for security and crime prevention in 2009. Since then, the UAV project attracts many more keen students to take part in, and new features are added on to the UAV every year. The project won the First Prize in a UK university competition. Three of the students are now pursuing their PhDs in UCL and I am the First Supervisor of two of them. This year, my PhD student A. Al-armaghany has won the D. F. Bruley Award in the ISOTT 2012 and EPSRC has funded the development of the medical device proposed in the project.

Education

University College London: Other Postgraduate qualification (including professional), ATQ03 - Recognised by the HEA as a Fellow | 2007
University College London: Other Postgraduate qualification (including professional), Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education | 2007
City University of Hong Kong: Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy | 1997
City University of Hong Kong: First Degree, Bachelor of Engineering | 1993

Biography

I was born in Hong Kong and received the B.Eng.(Hons.) and Ph.D. degrees in Electronic Engineering from the City University of Hong Kong in 1993 and 1997, respectively. After graduation, I worked as a research fellow in the Department of Electronic Engineering in the university for two years. Then I took up the post Expert researcher in the Photonic Information Technology Group and Millimetre-wave Devices Group of National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NiCT), Japan, where my main research focused on millimetre-wave planar antennas that would smoothly integrate with photonic devices for high-speed wireless communication systems. In 2005, I started my academic career in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, UCL, as a lecturer

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