Once again, the Adams Fellowship is awarded to a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Engineering

The prestigious honor, given for academic excellence, was bestowed upon Yaron Laufer from Prof. Sharon Gannot’s lab

This year, for the second time since the Faculty of Engineering, was founded at Bar-Ilan, one of its PhD candidates is being honored with the Adams Fellowship. The fellowship is annually awarded by the Israel National Academy of Sciences to only eight doctoral candidates of all universities, for personal academic and research excellence.

It is no surprise that Yaron Laufer, 33, a married father of two, has won this honor. He completed both of his degrees – the second one under the supervision of Prof. Shraga Bross – with honors. The results of his MSc research thesis in communication and information theory were published in a leading magazine and presented in two international conferences. During his studies Laufer has garnered numerous awards, scholarships and academic achievements, including the Ilanot “chosen” scholarship, the Faculty Dean’s Awards and the Rector’s Award of Excellence (for his BSc and MSc, respectively), and the Intel Prize for Research Students.

After spending four years in the industry, working as a researcher and developer of signal processing algorithms in electronic warfare, Laufer returned to BIU and the Faculty of Engineering. These days he is working on his doctoral thesis on speech signal processing, under the supervision of Prof. Sharon Gannot. His research focuses on developing statistical methods and theoretical bounds for estimating speech signals from multi-microphone recordings contaminated by reverberation, interfering speakers and noise. Solutions to this problem are of great importance for various applications in devices as diverse as mobile phones, hands-free systems, and hearing aids, which nowadays are equipped with multiple microphones. The results of his research have been published in a journal paper and presented in two international conference papers.