I am graduate student in Electrical Engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. Currently, I am pursuing a Ph.D. with an emphasis on Telecommunications and am interested in next generation wireless communication systems that employ multiple antennas. In 2006, I received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University. Wisconsin was my previous home. In 1998, I graduated with honors from Wauwatosa West High School and then attended University of Wisconsin - Madison where I studied Electrical Engineering. I received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2003. As an undergrad, I had a Co-Op at W. L. Gore & Associates working on fiber optic link modules. During this time, I also did research with Luke Mawst on long wavelength semi-conductor optical devices.
You can download my CV: kirsch_cv.pdf (11/19/08)
My electrical engineering research falls under the major category of wireless communications, but more specifically multiple antenna systems. Recently, I have taken a broader interest in networking issues, particulary those that deal with ad-hoc networks. The complete wireless system is very appealing to me, however, I am most comfortable in the physical layer. The area of research that is quickly piquing my interest is cognitive radio.
Multiple-input Multiple-output (MIMO) is a quickly developing area of wireless communications that utilizes multiple antennas at both ends of a communication link in order to take advantage of the multipath rich enivornment. Most of my reasearch has centered on the development of a five node multiple antenna mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) for the Drexel Wireless Systems Laboratory. Each node is very configurable from the application layer down to the transceivers used. We have written a custom software defined radio (SDR) in LabVIEW that runs on the same machine as the high-speed ADCs. The higher level layers are run on a Linux Box through the Click! modular router.
I have also done work with computational electromagnectics to study the effects of antennas and mutual coupling on MIMO communications systems. A few other projects include MANET optimization/simulation and cognitive radio wireless communications.