OPTIMAL ANTENNAS:
Performance Limits and Inverse Design

Mats Gustafsson
Lund University, Sweden

Mats Gustafsson received the M.Sc. degree in Engineering Physics 1994, the Ph.D. degree in Electromagnetic Theory 2000, was appointed Docent 2005, and Professor of Electromagnetic Theory 2011, all from Lund University, Sweden.

He co-founded the company Phase holographic imaging AB in 2004. His research interests are in scattering and antenna theory and inverse scattering and imaging. He has written over 100 peer-reviewed journal papers and over 100 conference papers. Prof. Gustafsson received the IEEE Schelkunoff Transactions Prize Paper Award 2010, IEEE Uslenghi Letters Prize Paper Award 2019, and Best Paper Awards at EuCAP 2007 and 2013. He served as an IEEE AP-S Distinguished Lecturer 2013-15

Miloslav Capek
CTU in Prague, Czech Republic

Miloslav Capek is a Full Professor at the Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic. Miloslav is a senior member of the IEEE. He serves as an associate editor of IET Microwaves, Antennas & Propagation. He was a member of the Delegate Assembly of EurAAP between 2015 and 2020 (Group 8). He leads the development of the AToM (Antenna Toolbox for MATLAB) package and serves as a vice-chair of EurAAP “Software and Modeling” working group. He is the author or co-author of over 160 journal and conference papers. His current research interests include the area of electromagnetic theory, electrically small antennas, numerical techniques, and optimization. He received the 2023 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Edward E. Altshuler Prize Paper Award and the ESoA Best Teachers 2023.

Kurt Schab
Santa Clara University, USA

Kurt Schab is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA USA. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering and physics from Portland State University in 2011 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013 and 2016, respectively. From 2016 to 2018 he was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. His research focuses on the intersection of numerical methods, electromagnetic theory, and antenna design.

Owen Miller
Yale University, USA

Owen Miller is an Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and the Energy Sciences Institute at Yale. His research group uses techniques from applied mathematics to explore the extreme limits of nanophotonics and broader wave physics. This research, in collaboration with experimental and industrial teams, has led to record-performance demonstrations in applications ranging from photovoltaics to smoke grenades. He is the recipient of AFOSR and DARPA young investigator awards, as well as the Yale Graduate Mentor award.

Rasmus Ellebæk Christiansen
DTU, Denmark

Rasmus Ellebæk Christiansen holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in computational mathematics. He received his PhD from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 2016 for his work on topology optimization for frequency domain applications. During his PhD he visited Prof. Jan Hesthaven at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where he performed research on efficient numerical solvers for wave propagation problems. During a subsequent Post Doc, he visited Prof. Steven G. Johnson at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he performed research on developing tools and exploring inverse design applied to plasmonically enhanced Raman scattering and optical metasurfaces. He has become an expert in the field of inverse design through his continued focus, and today he works as an Associate Professor out of the Topology Optimization group at DTU. His primary research interest is inverse design applied to wave-propagation problems within electromagnetics and mechanics. A key focus of his work is ensuring highly accurate experimental realization of inversely designed device blueprints. This, through integration of fabrication constraints in the design process. Done right, this enables direct fabrication of highly optimized devices, accurately replicating numerically predicted performance without the need for calibration or post processing of the optimized blueprints.

Niels Aage
DTU, Denmark

Niels Aage is one of the top researchers in the field of ultra-large scale finite element methods and structural optimization approaches. He is an expert on the use of high-performance computing for the solution of heterogeneous partial differential equations for multiphysics problems incl. electromagnetics, thermofluidics, vibroacoustics, multiscale mechanics and inverse design. In 2023, Niels Aage was elected vice-president of the International Society for Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization, an honor bestowed on him by colleagues from all over the world. He has received several prices for his pioneering work on giga-scale computational morphogenesis (Nature 2017, Nat.Comm 2020) and has authored more than 62 papers in international journals, including three “highly cited in field”. Furthermore, Niels Aage has developed several specialized structural optimization open-source codes tailored for use on high-performance computing systems as well as interactive apps for educational purposes.

Lasse Hjuler Christiansen
TICRA, Denmark

Lasse Christiansen holds an M.Sc. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), obtained in 2015. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computational Mathematics from DTU in 2019 for his work on PDE-constrained optimization, where his research focused on developing computationally efficient and scalable algorithms for large-scale optimization problems by combining elements of high-performance computing, iterative solution strategies, reduced-order modeling, and deep neural networks. Since 2021, Lasse Christiansen has worked at TICRA, the software company behind the popular antenna design and optimization software suite TICRA Tools. This software suite includes market-leading products such as GRASP (for PO-based scattering analysis of high-frequency antenna systems), ESTEAM (for integral-equation-based scattering analysis of electrically large systems), and CHAMP 3D (for analysis of feeds and feed chains), among other products. At TICRA, Lasse Christiansen holds the position of Senior Machine Learning Engineer in the Mathematics and AI team. His responsibilities encompass research and development, technical engineering, and project management. His current research interests include the interplay between scientific computing, optimization, surrogate modeling, and machine learning, focusing on how ML-based methods, including deep neural networks and Gaussian Processes, can support and augment traditional algorithms to ensure scalability, enable real-time computation, and address otherwise computationally intractable problems in the design, analysis, and optimization of antennas.

Tonny Rubæk
TICRA, Denmark

Tonny Rubæk received the M.Sc. and PhD degree in Electrical Engineering in 2004 and 2008, respectively, all from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He was a Post Doc at DTU and Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, between 2008 to 2013. Between 2013-2017, he was an antenna system engineer at OHB System in Bremen, Germany, where he was responsible for subcontract management, system-level performance analyses, EMC engineering, and antenna design on communication, navigation, and radar satellites. Since 2017, Tonny holds the position of a Senior Research Engineer at TICRA as a member of the applied electromagnetics team. At TICRA, he actively participates in the test and development cycle of all TICRA software products and assists TICRA’s customers under their technical support contract. In addition, he is the Product Lead for TICRA’s reflector antenna software and is responsible for the development of the GRASP and POS software packages.