George V. Eleftheriades, PhD, will receive the 2008 Kiyo Tomiyasu Award for his research into negative refractive index metamaterials, IEEE announced today. Metamaterials have had a profound impact on a variety of technologies including high-speed digital circuits, medical imaging, radar and wireless telecommunications. Eleftheriades, professor and Canada Research Chair in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, introduced transmission-line "left-handed" metamaterials, which have unusual properties including a negative index of refraction over wide operating bandwidths and with low losses. His research demonstrates how waves can become focused onto a point, rather than diverging outward, enabling the use of flat-surfaced lenses with significantly higher resolution than conventional lenses that are influencing applications such as medical diagnostic imaging and microscopy, IEEE said. An IEEE Fellow, Eleftheriades has served as a distinguished lecturer for the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society and associate editor of its journal. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he was a research scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. He holds a BS from the National Technology University of Athens, Athens, Greece; and a master's in electrical engineering and doctorate from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has authored or co-authored over 80 refereed journal papers and over 110 conference papers. The award, sponsored by the Kiyo Tomiyasu Fund and the IEEE Geoscience & Remote Sensing Society, will be presented to Eleftheriades June 17 at the 2008 International Microwave Symposium in Atlanta.