It's Wireless For First PSU/Tennessee State Partnership Student

Photo of Tyrone Peebles

8-19-97
University Park, Pa. -- Tyrone Peebles, a master's degree candidate at Tennessee State University, is spending his summer doing research on wireless communication at Penn State, compliments of the University's Applied Research Laboratory (PSU/ARL).

Why wireless? Peebles confidently explains, "It's the cutting edge."

Peebles is the first student selected to serve as a visiting summer graduate student in the Penn State/Tennessee State Partnership launched earlier this year. Through the partnership, PSU/ARL, a Navy-oriented research facility, provides funding for TSU faculty members and graduate students for conditioned based maintenance research, particularly in the areas of signal processing and neural networks.

Dr. David L. Hall, PSU/ARL associate director and professor of electrical engineering, says, "These areas are a particularly good match for Penn State and TSU because of complimentary expertise and experimental facilities."

Peebles, who earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., says the hands-on research at Penn State has got him thinking about eventually going for a Ph.D. Originally, he didn't think he'd go to graduate school at all.

Peebles says, "Going to graduate school was a last-minute decision. My heart wasn't in it when I was looking at graduate schools. I had too many job offers. I had to turn job offers down to go to grad school."

Peebles also had to think about the $20,000 in student loans left over from his undergraduate education and his younger siblings whom he wants to help as they pursue their educations.

Nevertheless, Peebles says, "The Lord put it in my heart to go." And now, the soft-spoken achiever from Eutaw, Ala., is very glad he did.

"I was just looking for a master's thesis project," he says. "But I learned that wireless research is very popular. The research will make me even more marketable when I do go out looking for a job."

Peebles adds, "I didn't understand things very clearly before but through the hands-on research, I'm beginning to understand more."

He is conducting his summer research at Penn State's Center for Information and Communications Technology Research (CICTR) with Dr. M. Kavehrad, CICTR director and professor of electrical engineering.

In addition to Peebles, Dr. Barak Entemadi, professor of physics, at Florida A&M University, is working at Penn State this summer on digital processing and is also funded by PSU/ARL. The Penn State/Tennessee State partnership also supports, in part, two subcontracts to TSU. The subcontracts are part of two Office of Naval Research grants to ARL, including a multidisciplinary, multi-year study of integrated predictive diagnostics and an accelerated capabilities initiative.

Hall adds, "This collaboration has been explicitly cited by Dr. Anita Jones, Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Department of Defense, as an excellent model of cooperation between a university, the Office of Naval Research, and an historically Black school. Much of the credit for initiating this collaboration should go to Dr. Ray Hettche, ARL Director, and Dr. Decatur B. Rogers, Dean of TSU's College of Engineering."

**bah**

EDITORS: Photos are available on request.
Contacts:
Barbara Hale (814) 865-9481 (office) (814) 238-0997 (home) bah@psu.edu
Vicki Fong (814) 865-9481 (office) (814) 238-1221 (home) vyf1@psu.edu