Story Behind the Success: Christian Jones

I am incredibly honored to receive the Robert T. Hill Best Dissertation Award.

My research interests have always been driven by what my advisor calls “something shiny syndrome”, a tendency to dive deep into a new concept until the next exciting idea catches my eye. My dissertation is largely a collection of these ideas, and it would not have come together cohesively without the input, guidance, and support many of my colleagues have provided me with along the way.

I’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on my journey through graduate school and express my gratitude to those who helped shaped it.

First off, I want to thank my advisor, Prof. Shannon Blunt. In Spring 2017, I took his Electronic Amplifiers course, where his teaching style and challenging but fair tests help rekindle my passion for electrical engineering, which had been shaky since a summer internship that felt more like Excel training than engineering work. Toward the end of the semester, Shannon encouraged me to consider graduate school, explaining how it opens doors to opportunities that I felt better fit my temperament. That conversation set me on this path, and I joined the Radar Systems and Remote Sensing Laboratory at the University of Kansas (KU-RSL) as a research assistant the next semester. There I dove head first into radar signal processing and hands-on RF experiments under Shannon’s tutelage.

That first year, I secured a summer internship at L3 Adaptive Methods, where I was expected to apply several structure-based estimation techniques, an area KU-RSL had a history in but one that I had only briefly examined. Thankfully, prior to me leaving for the summer, fellow grad students Prof. Jonathan Owen and Dr. Lumumba Harnett generously gave me a crash course on the fundamentals and background they had experience in. Their mentorship was invaluable and served as the foundation that I built all subsequent research on. At L3, I worked under Travis Cuprak, who prioritized building on this foundation and detailing the practical needs and limitations real systems face. In particular, there I learned the critical importance of algorithmic robustness and computational efficiency, which laid out the path for my dissertation research.

Back at KU-RSL, I was fortunate to sit next to (then grad student) Prof. Charles Mohr who helped me learn to set up optimization problems and pose algorithms in tractable manners via optimization. That subsequent summer I interned at Systems and Technology Research (STR), where Dr. Jimmy Vogel’s mathematical insight helped further expand my optimization interest and skill set via the introduction of linear algebra matrix structure. Then, in 2020, Prof. Suzanne Shontz expanded my understanding even further through her rigorous and challenging optimization coursework.

In Summer 2020, I secured an internship at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), but due to the covid pandemic, it became a virtual experience. Despite this, my NRL mentors, Dr. Kevin Wagner, Dr. Dan Scholnik, and Dr. Thomas Higgins, introduced me to new problem spaces and challenges that reshaped my research vision and clarified my contribution goals. I enjoyed the work at NRL so much that I returned in person the following summer and ultimately decided to stay permanently after graduation.

As pandemic restrictions eased and I was able to return in person to KU-RSL, I had the privilege of working closely with Prof. Patrick McCormick, whose remarkable ability to unify seemingly unrelated ideas pushed my research in new and exciting directions.

I also want to acknowledge two more graduate students, Dr. Daniel Herr and Dr. Brandon Ravenscroft, for being mentors, colleagues, and teammates at different points in my journey. Additionally, I am grateful to Prof. Jim Stiles for strengthening my RF systems and estimation theory background and to the late Prof. Christopher Allen for sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of radar systems. Thank you to the remaining KU-RSL students and staff for fostering such an engaging and interactive research environment. Lastly, thank you to the IEEE Radar community for setting an example for me to follow and continuously striving for new and interesting research avenues in a field that is over century old.

Finally, to my fiancée, Dr. Taylor George. Thank you for standing by me throughout graduate school and always pushing me to be my best. Watching your dedication and hard work during your own graduate school experience inspired me to keep striving.

My journey has been shaped by the brilliant minds I’ve had the privilege to learn from and work with. I am deeply grateful to all who played a role in it.

Written by Christian Jones.