2025 Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation Awards Stony Brook EE Students
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| Prof. Jayant P. Parekh presents the award to the graduate awardee, Dr. Bilal |
The 2025 Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation (AMRF) Awards were given out to two Stony Brook University EE students, one an undergraduate student (Kamil Galazka) and the other a graduate student (Laiba Bilal). The awards were given to the students for excellence in high GPA achievement. Each award consisted of a certificate together with a check for $1,250.
The venue for the award ceremony was elevated to the ECE Department Commencement Ceremony, which was held on May 22, 2025, at the Staller Center for the Arts. The event had a large audience, including the parents, relatives, and friends of the awardees, and the hall was jam-packed to its full capacity of about 600 persons. A reception was held immediately following the award ceremony at the Wang Center, and a broad range of refreshments and snacks was served to the attendees.
The awards were presented by Prof. Jayant P. Parekh, who also serves as the Vice President of the AMRF. Two universities, Columbia University and Stony Brook University, are represented on the Board of Directors of the AMRF and are recipients of funding from the Foundation, which makes the awards given out every year possible. Stony Brook University has been affiliated with the AMRF for more than 35 years.
The Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation (AMRF) is based at Columbia University and is named after the pre-eminent radio engineer Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890 – 1954), who, through his extraordinary and revolutionary inventions in the field of radio engineering, indisputably ranks among the greatest scientists and tinkerers of all time. Armstrong’s research and inventions took place largely at Columbia University, where he originally went in as an undergraduate student, and later ended up becoming a Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department.
The mission of the AMRF is to celebrate and memorialize the genius and achievements of Armstrong, who, through his inventions in the field of radio engineering, ranks among the greatest scientists of all time. Armstrong’s grandest invention was the FM radio, which revolutionized the use of radio, dominated until then by the AM radio. The FM radio, through its vastly superior immunity to noise, propelled the world of high-fidelity broadcasting to lofty heights.
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| Undergraduate Awardee Kamil Galazka |
It is noteworthy that Armstrong’s first major invention, namely, the regenerative
circuit (commonly called in today’s world as a positive feedback amplifier), happened
while he was still just an undergraduate student at Columbia University. This invention
was a major development in the world of radio because it made long-distance AM transmission
possible. His patents just on this invention made him a rich man, with more riches
to follow with more and even more impactful inventions in the following years.
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Audience at the award ceremony |
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Edwin Howard Armstrong |
One of Armstrong’s extraordinary traits was that he was fearless in undertaking to
study topics shunned by others because they were too complex or thought to be unsolvable!
His fearlessness extended to other spheres, including his remarkable act of climbing
to the top of a 115-foot radio tower installed on the roof of a 21-story building
in midtown Manhattan! A photograph showing him atop this radio tower is given below.
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Fearless Armstrong atop RCA’s 115-foot antenna tower, which stood on the roof of the 21-story Aeolian Hall in Midtown Manhattan |
In 1983, the US Postal Service honored four eminent inventors known for impactful
inventions, including Armstrong, by issuing the stamps shown below.
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The top right of the USPS 1983 Inventors Stamp Series is dedicated to Edwin Howard Armstrong. |
For more information on Armstrong’s remarkable life and achievements, the reader is
directed to the cited references.
REFERENCES
- Website of the AMRF, www.armstrongmemorialfoundation.org
- T. Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (HarperCollins, 1991)
- M. Schwartz, Armstrong’s invention of noise-suppressing FM [History of Communications], Communications Magazine, IEEE, vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 20-23, April 2009
- The Legacies of Edwin Howard Armstrong (The Radio Club of America, 1990)
- Yannis Tsividis, Edwin Armstrong: Pioneer of the Airwaves, in Columbia Magazine, Spring 2002.