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Kevin Cho awarded 2018 HCES Student Engineer of the Year

2018 Student Engineer of the Year: Kevin J. Cho

The 2018 HCES SEOY award goes to Mr. Kevin J. Cho, who is majoring in Computer Engineering in the Electrical Engineering Department, College of Engineering (CoE), University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), and is expected to graduate with a BS CEng in the Spring semester of 2018 with a "meager" cumulative GPA of 3.85/4.00 and a major GPA of 3.94/4.00.

Kevin is a proud 2014 graduate of Hawaii Baptist Academy and originally started his engineering education in electrical engineering but quickly switched to computer engineering after realizing his passion for programming. As a result, he has accumulated a wide breadth and depth of engineering knowledge during his short tenure at UHM.

So, upon enrolling at UHM, Kevin quickly made a decision to get involved in research projects around campus. Thus, he has been involved in multiple projects including UH Drone Technologies, Liquid Metal Electronics, Smart Campus Energy Lab, and UH Ambient Research group. He is particularly proud of his efforts in the Liquid Metal Electronics group as this has earned him three coauthored, peer-reviewed research papers: 1) "A Liquid-Metal Polarization-Pattern-Reconfigurable Dipole Antenna," 2) "Reconfigurable Liquid-Metal Antenna With Integrated Surface-Tension Actuation," in the 2016 IEEE 11th Annual International Conference on Nano/Micro Engineered and Molecular Systems; and 3) "Vertically Integrated Research in Reconfigurable Liquid-Metal RF Devices," presented at the 2016 National Radio Science Meeting.

Kevin has interned at three impressive, yet very different, companies during his college career. In the Summer of 2015, he worked as an undergraduate researcher, one of four chosen department-wide, for a study abroad program at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) in Japan. In the Summer of 2016, he interned at Northrop Grumman Corporation's (NGC) Aerospace Systems at Redondo Beach, CA in the Microelectronics department testing High Electron Mobility Transistors on III-V compounds. His most recent summer internship was at Amazon at Seattle, WA where he worked on launching Amazon's first social media product Amazon Spark. His project was to work on a product-picking feature. This feature has now been released within an application and used by 80% of users. During the academic year, he has worked as a teaching assistant for two, core-level EE classes, an organizer for the EE 496 Poster Sessions, and an undergraduate research assistant.

Kevin's professional activities include the president of the UH Manoa chapter of IEEE-HKN. He has also held the roles of Webmaster for IEEE and the Student Advisory Board chair. He has also participated as a member of IMS 2017's steering committee and volunteered at the previous two IMS conferences.

All in all, a pretty impressive "early career" for a young man who is graduating this spring...


"2018 Student Engineer of the Year." Wiliki o Hawaii: Engineer of Hawaii, February 2018, p. 1-7.


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