ECE Welcomes Ghalichechian, Heck to Georgia Tech

The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering is pleased to welcome our two newest faculty members, Nima Ghalichechian and Larry Heck, to Georgia Tech.

Ghalichechian is an assistant professor and is a member of the electromagnetics technical interest group. His office is located in TSRB Room 534. 

Ghalichechian joins us from the Department of ECE at The Ohio State University, where he worked for nine years. While at Ohio State, Ghalichechian was a research scientist and a research assistant professor, and in 2017, he was appointed as an assistant professor. Ghalichechian earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, and he received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology in Iran. 

Ghalichechian will lead the mmWave Antennas and Arrays Laboratory, where he and his team conduct research in design, simulation, fabrication, and characterization of novel on-chip and reconfigurable antennas and arrays operating in the mmWave band (30-300 GHz). Ghalichechian’s research interests are in millimeter-wave antennas and arrays, 5G/6G antenna systems, reconfigurable antennas and components, on-chip antennas and arrays, reflectarrays and phase arrays, and phase-change materials and devices. 

While at OSU, Ghalichechian received an NSF CAREER Award in 2019. He also received the ECE Teaching Excellence Award at Ohio State and the Lumley Research Award from OSU’s College of Engineering. Ghalichechian currently serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters.

Heck is a professor and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and he holds the Rhesa Screven Farmer, Jr., Advanced Computing Concepts Chair. Heck is a member of the digital signal processing and the computer systems and software technical interest groups. His office is located in TSRB Room 436B. 

Heck earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in ECE from Georgia Tech, and his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Texas Tech University. He is returning to Tech after nearly 30 years in industry, most recently serving as the president and CEO of Viv Labs, senior vice president of Samsung Electronics, and head of Bixby North America. 

Heck will lead the AI Virtual Assistant Lab in ECE, where he and his team will conduct research on open-domain, fully conversational, multimodal interactive virtual digital humans that learn from each other and every interaction with humans. His research interests are in machine/deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing, conversational systems, and speech/speaker recognition. 

To date, Heck has over 125 journal and conference publications and holds over 50 patents. He is an IEEE Fellow, and he received the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering in 2017. Heck received the Texas Tech University Whitacre College of Engineering Distinguished Engineer Award in that same year. 

“Please check out Nima’s and Larry’s faculty profiles on the ECE website and send them an email greeting or introduce yourselves as you see them in online meetings or in person on campus,” said Douglas M. Blough, the Interim Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and ECE professor. “I am excited to have them both here at Georgia Tech and look forward to them having productive, fun, and rewarding careers with us!”