“It was kind of a surprise. They sent me an e-mail out of the blue,” Bernhard said. “Once I considered it, I thought it would be a great outlet for me to have an impact on my discipline in a broader way.”
As series editor, Bernhard will recruit people to write books that she thinks will represent cutting edge topics, while being very useful for both scholars and working engineers in antennas and propagation, as well as other related areas.
With a great deal of professional service work behind her, Bernhard will use her access to the field, its experts, and the community to make contact with potential authors.
“I was president of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society a couple years ago,” she said. “That really allowed me view the professional community and their activities and technical interests very broadly. I was able to see and appreciate what many different people were doing around the world, not just in my own specific field, but in several related areas as well.”
Bernhard hopes to promote antennas and propagation so other people in and outside the field can see how vibrant and relevant the research is.
There are several topics she hopes to make more visible in the coming years, including flexible spectrum access, cognitive radio, and passive radar techniques, where radar images are acquired using existing transmitters’ energy. She would also like to promote advanced techniques for propagation and microwave/millimeter wave imaging that can be used for buried object detection and foliage penetration. These have security, information-gathering, and environmental-monitoring applications.