MTL professor Charles Sodini is one of the latest holders of the LeBel Chair of Electrical Engineering, announced Professor Eric Grimson in an e-mail dated August 27 to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty.
The LeBel chair was established by the estate of the late Clarence Joseph LeBel in 1965. The two previous holders of the chair are Amar Bose, who held the chair from 1965 to 1977, and Ken Stevens, who held the chair from 1977 until his retirement this past June. "A recent decision has enabled MIT to split the chair into two new chairs, to which John [Tsitsiklis, professor, EECS; the other chair recipient named in the e-mail] and Charlie have been named," wrote Grimson.
By way of some history, Clarence Joseph LeBel graduated in 1926 with an SB and 1927 with an SM from MIT. He worked for Raytheon and then Sylvania, specializing in lighting, and was the inventor of a famous and much-litigated patent on fluorescent lights. He co-founded Audio Devices in 1937, and was a pioneer in recording discs, magnetic media for tapes, and in hearing aids and stethoscopes. The chair was originally established to recognize faculty working in audio engineering, but its scope has been broadened to include other areas of electrical engineering.
Charlie Sodini received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Sociology from Purdue University in 1974. After graduating from Purdue, Charlie was a Technical Staff Member, and later Project Leader, at Hewlett Packard Labs. While at HP, Sodini continued his studies and was awarded his Master of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering (1981) and Ph.D. (1982) from the University of California, Berkeley. He was appointed to our faculty in 1983, and promoted to Full Professor in 1992. Charlie's research interests are in electronics and integrated circuit design and technology. More specifically, his research concerns technology intensive integrated circuit and systems design, with application toward sensory interface electronics and wireless communication emphasizing analog signal processing and RF integrated circuits. He has published extensively in these areas, and is co-author with Roger Howe of the textbook Microelectronics: An Integrated Approach.
Charlie has been very visible in professional leadership, having served as President of the IEEE Solid-State Circuit Society, as well as General Chair of the IEEE VLSI Circuits Symposium and the International Electron Devices Meeting. He has also been involved in commercialization activities, co-founding SMaL Camera Technologies, which develops digital imaging solutions for a variety of business and consumer markets, including ultra-slim digital still cameras, automotive vision systems, and camera-enabled mobile devices (such as cell phones). Charlie has won best paper awards from ISSCC and the Darlington Award from the Circuits and Systems Society. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1995 for contributions to the development of over sampled A/D converters, DRAM devices and circuits, and integrated circuits process technology.