Dr. Edmund Spencer, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering
Dr. Edmund Spencer is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of South Alabama. He is the Principal Investigator for the NASA Undergraduate Student Instrument Program award to develop the JAGSAT I CubeSat. Dr. Spencer is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award and an NSF National Space Weather Program (NSWP) award. He has authored or co-authored 33 peer-reviewed publications and 40 conference presentations. He is co-developer of the WINDMI model, a nonlinear dynamical model of the earth's nightside magnetosphere, used to analyze geomagnetic storms and substorms. This model is available for runs on request at the NASA Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC). He is the inventor of the Time Domain Impedance Probe (TDIP), an instrument that measures plasma properties in the earth's ionosphere. The TDIP is the payload instrument on JAGSAT I.
Dr. Spencer's background is in electromagnetics, space plasma physics, and analog electronics. His research interests include space plasma physics and space weather, design and development of CubeSats for science missions, design and development of next generation AC and RF instruments for space science and space plasma characterization, development of theoretical and analytical frameworks to analyze and interpret the measured data from instruments immersed in or proximate to a plasma, analyzing the interaction of the solar wind with the earth's magnetosphere and the nonlinear dynamics of growth, onset, expansion and recovery phases of geomagnetic substorms, the development of full electromagnetic 3D Particle-In-Cell codes for the analysis of RF instrument behavior in space plasmas, analyzing and synthesizing models to explain satellite and ground based measurements of geomagnetic activity, genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, and differential evolution.
Dr. Saeed Latif, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Electrical Engineerin
Dr. Saeed I. Latif is an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of South Alabama (USA).He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of Manitoba, Canada and where there after he was awarded the NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship by CancerCare Manitoba and University of Manitoba. His current research interests include antenna design and analysis for mobile and satellite communications, and millimeter wave antennas for 5G wireless systems.
Dr. Latif has broad expertise in design and implementation of miniaturized and multiband antennas for wireless and biomedical systems, and circularly polarized antennas for space communications. He has been published in over 15 journal articles and over 50 proceedings papers.
Dr. Samuel Russ, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering
Dr. Samuel Russ is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of South Alabama (USA). He serves as the lead computer engineering faculty member on the Jagsat-1 project. Before arriving at South Alabama, Dr. Russ managed the hardware design of cable set-top boxes for high-volume manufacturing and developed a pioneering class in Signal Integrity.
Dr. Russ is involved in all aspects of embedded-system design including hardware design, circuit-board design, signal integrity, software development, software-hardware co-design, and software engineering. Dr. Russ has 29 U.S. Patents and a project he managed won an Engineering and Technology Emmy Award in 2013.
Dr. Carlos Montalvo, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Carlos Montalvo is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of South Alabama (USA) and the Director of the Facility for Aerospace Systems and Technology (FAST). In addition, he serves as the faculty advisor for Design, Build, Fly, Launch Society, JagSat and AIAA. Prior to this appointment at USA, he was a research engineer at Georgia Tech where he received his Masters and PhD. His research interests lie at the intersection of flight dynamics, control and design of unmanned aerial vehicles with a focus on multi-body systems.
Dr. Montolvo is involved in all types of unmanned aerial vehicle research with a focus on controls of multi-body systems including aircraft, quadrotors, parafoils, projectiles, spacecraft and tethered systems. He has presented his research findings in the classroom as well as published in JOA, JGCD, SIMULATION, JOAE: Part G, Wind Engineering, JSR and Acta Astronautica with major research funding from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC).
Dr. Joseph Richardson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Joseph D. Richardson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering. Prior to joining South Alabama, Dr. Richardson held positions with various organizations including the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Tennessee Tech University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He has also worked as a NASA subcontractor.
His interests include mechanics, heat transfer, stochastic analyses and computer simulation. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Vanderbilt University.
Dr. Mohamed Shaban, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Dr. Mohamed Shaban is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical, and Computer Engineering department at the University of South Alabama. He has received the Ph.D., and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2016,and 2012 respectively. He has also received the M.S. degree in Electrical Communications Engineering, and the B.S. degree in Electronics, and Communications Engineering from Mansoura University, Egypt in 2010, and 2006 respectively. His current research interests are in the fields of Signal, and Image Processing for Medical Applications, Machine, and Deep Learning Applications.