A UCF electrical engineering professor has been honored with a fellow designation by an international engineering society.
Professor Xun Gong has been recognized for his impactful contributions to the electrical engineering field by being selected as a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The global institution boasts nearly a half million engineers and technologists worldwide.
Each year, less than 0.1% of the organization’s voting members are chosen to become IEEE Fellows.
Gong says it is an honor to be recognized, and to be joining an elite group of colleagues who were chosen for their significant influence in microwave engineering. He is a member of two IEEE societies, the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S) and IEEE Antennas and Propagations (AP-S). Though his elevation to fellow is from MTT-S, his research spans both IEEE subsets.
“There are many great researchers in both societies who have contributed to the advancement of microwave and antenna technologies for various applications such as communications, radar and sensing,” he says. “Each selected IEEE Fellow made significant impacts in one of the research areas.”
Gong was selected for the honor for based on his work on high-Q filters — narrow-bandwidth, energy efficient filters — and their integration with antenna and related applications.
Antennas need filters to ensure a clean signal, helping to minimize interference in transmissions.
“Traditionally, filters and antennas are separately designed, optimized and then connected through 50-ohm connections, which often results in bulky structure, deteriorated frequency bandwidth and excessive loss,” Gong says.
Gong’s groundbreaking work merges the two. He studied various filter structures and antenna topologies, then designed a framework to co-design the two components based on an innovative synthesized circuit model.
“The co-designed ‘filtenna’ exhibits a compact form factor and low insertion loss without compromising filtering and radiating functions,” he says. “Demonstrably, the antenna efficiency is shown to be above 95% which is impossible in the traditional fashion where a transition is compulsory between the filter and antenna.”
Among Gong’s significant contributions to the field is another novel integration. His inventive work on high-temperature sensors uses high-Q microwave resonators with antennas, allowing them to be used in harsh environments such as combustion turbines, spacecraft, hypersonic vehicles and nuclear reactors.
“These wireless sensors achieve a near 100% efficiency in transmitting the wireless signals through the sensor,” Gong says. “This high efficiency is particularly important for high-temperature sensing since the sensing distance will be significantly shorter with lossy structures.”
He is greatly appreciative of the support he has received from Professor Zhihua Qu, Department Chair Reza Abdolvand and Dean Michael Georgiopoulos. Throughout his career at UCF, he says they have championed his academic and research efforts by nominating him for the awards he’s received, including the UCF Lockheed Martin Professorship, the UCF Reach for the Stars Award, the UCF CECS CAE Link Faculty Fellowship and the NSF CAREER Award.
Gong is especially grateful to his department colleague, Professor Emeritus Parveen Wahid.
“I would like to express my special thanks to Parveen Wahid, the ECE emeritus professor, for her kindness and high spirit,” he says. “We have been working together for more than 20 years to build a strong electromagnetics area at UCF, chair the flagship conference of AP-S, and organize numerous conferences and workshops.”
Written by Bel Huston | Dec. 10, 2025