Nuno Borges Carvalho
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My first column this year, in January 2023, started with “2023 is a new year, and we are getting out of the COVID era. We are living in a new world, a more digital era, where the universe has become smaller and more connected,” and now that we are getting to the end of the year, I can affirm, not only are we back in business and we leave the COVID times in the past, we now have higher and higher participation in our community. We are also approaching a new high in numbers of society members in conference participation and publications.
As IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S) president, I travel to a significant number of conferences, which was a great way to visit and share ideas with the microwave community. The community is growing and enthusiastic; technology and special wireless topics are essential to society; this is our main contribution to the world. MTT-S members are contributing to knowledge on climate change, health monitoring, Earth observation, mobility, and so on; the number of activities our members are doing is impressive and essential.
Figure 1 presents some of the photos of the last year, with most of these images related to sponsored conferences that the MTT-S president attended.
Figure 1. MTT-S president conference participation.
At the time of this writing, 2023 has not finished, and there are still more conferences to be held this year. From September to December, MTT-S will run conferences and networking activities in Leuven, Belgium (International Microwave Biomedical Conference, IMBioC), Berlin, Germany (European Microwave Week), Milpitas (Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems, EPEPS), Niš, Serbia (International Conference on Advanced Technologies, Systems, and Services in Telecommunications, TELSIKS), Barcelona, Spain (International Microwave and Optoelectronics Conference, IMOC), Chengdu, China (International Microwave Workshop Series on Advanced Materials and Processes for RF and THz Applications, IMWS-AMP), San Jose, Costa Rica (Latin America Microwave Conference, LAMC), Taiwan (Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference, APMC), Tel Aviv, Israel (International Conference on Microwaves Communications, Antennas, Biomedical Engineering, and Electronic Systems, COMCAS) [Editor’s Note: COMCAS has now been postponed], and Ahmedabad, India (Microwaves, Antennas, and Propagation Conference, MAPCON), representing the MTT-S global reach in the Americas, Europe, and Asia (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Sponsored MTT-S conferences from September to December 2023.
The vitality of our conferences is actually one of the main drivers and benefits we bring to our members, allowing them to promote and network with colleagues with common technical interests. The number of attendees is also up this year, confirming the need for members to attend high-quality technical events.
In this column I would also like to address a very important topic, which is the increase in numbers and activities of our chapters and student chapters all over the world, which is an important achievement. Figure 3 presents our chapter distribution all over the world.
Figure 3. MTT-S chapters all over the world.
This year we have significantly increased our membership numbers and diversity worldwide, but also our gender balance, and we expect this to be improved even more in the following years. Members of the MTT-S community traveled to South America to promote the society, and we were able to visit Brazil, Argentina, and Chile to promote the activities we are working on and how we can create a community in those areas, which is very important to improve our microwave presence. Next year we will do a similar arrangement in Africa. We expect to come back with significant participation from that continent and be able to create a community in countries that already have microwave engineers working actively but do not have an organized community in place. We expect that we will be able to increase our participation with those communities. On 24 October 2024 we will return to Africa with the International Microwaves and Antennas Symposium (IMAS), in Marrakech, Morocco.
We have also started in 2023 new educational activities with the creation of interesting tools for students, practitioners, and engineers, and especially new ways of motivating STEM students to the microwave area and to bring hardware back to its roots. We have a Distinguished Microwave Instructor event in place, we have a new intersociety distinguished microwave lecturer (DML), we have created a high-quality Smith chart to use in our designs, and we approved the delivery of nano-vector network analyzers to all chapters that make a request to the MTT-S. We continue to brainstorm ideas on how we can improve awareness and interest in the microwave technical field.
We have also new DMLs, as I stated in the November column, and we will give each technical committee the opportunity to create their own workshop and/or activity with a small budget of support from the society. We expect that new ideas will come out from the technical committees with a clear focus on their technical interest.
In 2024 we will also be present virtually with a new virtual event that will allow attendance by members who cannot travel due to budget, visa, work, or other limitations. The event will have a low registration cost, and we hope to be able to increase the number of colleagues learning about microwaves.
The year 2023 was a profitable year for new initiatives, and the above list is not exhaustive; I can say we had new conferences, new journals, new awards, new education activities, new technical interests, and all of this was only possible due to the efforts of our MTT Administrative Committee (AdCom) members, and especially to our volunteers around the world that make this happen. To all of you, we should give a really big round of applause and gratitude.
Finally, I would like to welcome our new AdCom members and President Maurizio Bozzi, whom I believe will bring MTT-S to a new level in 2024, and who will have my full support for that work.
I encourage you to visit our website (https://www.mtt.org) for more information about the MTT-S and volunteer opportunities.
Nuno Borges Carvalho (nbcarvalho@av.it.pt), 2023 MTT-S president, is with the Department of Electronics, Telecommunications, and Informatics, University of Aveiro, Aveiro 3810-193 Portugal.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MMM.2023.3318397