The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is pleased to announce that Adam Wilkerson and Scott Clouse, two students pursuing their Ph.D.’s in Electrical Engineering, are the recipients of Department of Defense SMART Scholarships.

The Science, Mathematics And Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship for Service Program has been established by the Department of Defense (DoD) to support undergraduate and graduate students pursuing degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The program aims to increase the number of civilian scientists and engineers working at DoD laboratories.

Adam Wilkerson is pursuing his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at NCSU after completing his Master’s in pure mathematics from Indiana University, where his focus was on Algebraic Topology.

While finishing his Ph.D. over the next two years, he will be working on analyzing social networks using techniques in algebraic topology beyond graph theory. These techniques are a combination of ideas derived from the social science and network community and ideas developed in the study of sensor network deployments over the last 15 years. The idea is that pairwise relationships in a social network don’t determine all the social structure within that group, and that higher-dimensional  data will shed some light on these holes in our understanding of human interactions.

After that, he’ll be working in Huntsville, AL, studying sensor network deployments and continuing his social networks research.

Hamilton Scott Clouse is pursuing a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at NCSU with an emphasis on pattern recognition. In the field of remote sensing, measurements are made from a distance with sensors of various modalities. Scott’s work centers on the combination of phenomenological understanding and signal/image processing techniques to extract high-level descriptions of scenes observed in this manner. These data are of great dimensionality and, under the direction of Dr. Hamid Krim, Scott focuses specifically on geometric analysis techniques for such high-dimensional data.