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Date:  Fri, May 08, 2026
Time:  8:30am - 9:30am
Location:  Holmes Hall 389; online available, check your email or contact the ECE office.
Speaker:  Jonathan Itokazu, candidate for PhD, advisor: Dr. Victor Lubecke

ECE Graduate Students: This will count towards your seminar credit.

Abstract

In established long-range radar applications such as weather monitoring, imaging, remote sensing, navigation, and tracking, polarimetry provides an additional layer of information about the scattering target or scene. Weather radar uses polarization diversity to distinguish precipitation types, while imaging and remote-sensing radar, including synthetic aperture radar (SAR), use polarimetric measurements to improve terrain classification, surface mapping, deformation monitoring, and hazard assessment. Unlike these long-range applications, short-range radar applications, including industrial measurements, military demining/UXO detection and classification, and medical diagnostics, often involve targets located only tens of centimeters to tens of meters from the radar. These measurements are sensitive to timing, hardware design, calibration, antenna coupling, leakage, near-field behavior, target orientation, clutter, and phase-sensitive signal recovery. As a result, short-range radar is highly application dependent because the target scattering behavior must often be understood and optimized for the specific sensing task. This dissertation focuses on short-range physiological Doppler radar, where weak, time-varying human radar returns are used to measure respiration and cardiopulmonary motion. In this application, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is not only a hardware or signal-processing limitation, but also a scattering problem because the human body is a distributed, non-rigid, dielectric, and highly variable target. This work uses polarimetric radar measurements and effective radar cross section (ERCS) analysis to improve physiological radar performance and extract additional information from human radar returns. The results show that polarization-diverse sensing can improve usable range, increase robustness to subject variability, and expand physiological radar analysis beyond a single displacement waveform.

Biography

Jon H. Itokazu (Graduate Student Member, IEEE) received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA, in 2016, and his M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the same institution in 2019. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA.

He is currently a Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where his research focuses on microwave biomedical applications and unexploded ordnance (UXO) detection. His research interests include radar systems, electromagnetics, RF/microwave/mmWave technologies, ASIC and analog IC design, and sensor technologies.

Mr. Itokazu currently serves as the Section Secretary of the IEEE Hawaii Section and has previously served as Chair of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) Student Branch Chapter at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa during the 2021–2022 and 2024–2025 terms. He is a recipient of the ARCS Scholar Award (2024) for outstanding research with significant potential to advance science and human welfare, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award (2024), and was selected as the recipient of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa College of Engineering Outstanding Ph.D. Student Award (2026).