Dr. Rafael A. Rodríguez Solís received a BS in electrical engineering and a BS in computer engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez in 1990, a MS degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida in 1993, and a PhD in electrical engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1997. He is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, where he serves as the Director of the UPRM Microwave and Millimeter-wave Systems Laboratory, UPRM PI for NOAA CESSRST, Director of the Institute for Research in Integrative Systems & Engineering (IRISE), coordinator for the RF Systems Laboratory, and ECE Graduate Program Coordinator. He received a NSF CAREER award in 2001 to work in the characterization of wideband slot-like antennas, and a NASA Glenn Faculty Fellowship in Summer 2012 to work in the development of microwave and millimeter-wave antennas using polyimide aerogels. He worked as a researcher with the NASA Tropical Center for Earth and Space Studies (TCESS) developing tunable antennas with electroceramic materials, and the NSF Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS) developing antennas for cross-well radar tomography, the NSF Center for Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) developing low cost electronically scanned antenna alternatives. He also worked in the development of a laboratory-scale Soil-Bed for the detection of contaminants in soil for the Department of Energy Savannah River Laboratory, in the development of VO2 based reconfigurable antennas with AFRL, in the development of a weather radar network system for Western Puerto Rico and in the development of antennas for body-centric applications for ARO. He is currently a Co-PI for the OASIS NSF CRISP Type II project, where he is researching weather nowcast service alternatives for renewable energy applications, and is working in the development of multiband microwave sensors for small UAVs in NOAA CESSRST. Dr. Rodríguez Solís was named Outstanding Professor in Electrical Engineering by the UPRM Engineering Faculty in 2013 and 2001 and is a Senior Member of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation, Microwave Theory and Techniques, Geoscience and Remote Sensing, and Education Societies. He is also a member of the Antennas and Propagation Society Education committee, and served as General Co-Chair for the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation, held in Fajardo, PR, in June 2016.
His research interests include wideband microwave and millimeter-wave antennas, reconfigurable, tunable and multiband antennas, wideband and tunable microwave circuits, microwave and millimeter-wave remote-sensing systems.
