The NSERC/MPR Teltech Research Chair in Radio Frequency Engineering was created on April 1, 1992 in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the University of Victoria (affectionately called UVic by its members and the inhabitants of British Columbia's provincial capital on Vancouver Island). Preparations began in the Spring of 1990 when UVic's Dean of Engineering, Dr. Eric Manning, approached me with the idea to establish the Chair and asked me to formulate a research proposal. The subsequent application for funding to the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) was co-ordinated by Dean Manning in close collaboration with Prof. Vahldieck, endorsed by MPR Teltech Inc. of Burnaby, B.C. as the industrial sponsor, as well as by the Science Council of British Columbia, the Advanced Systems Institute of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria. A site visit took place on September 13, 1991, the Chair program was officially approved by NSERC on October 1, 1991, and operations began on April 1, 1992.
The first months were devoted to the creation of the Electromagnetic Modeling and Simulation Laboratory in Room 256A of the Petch Building on the UVic campus in order to provide the necessary research facilities for the rapidly growing research group. The arrival in Victoria of two experienced research associates, P. So and C. Eswarappa, who had been working with me at the University of Ottawa in previous years, assured a flying start and a certain continuity of research activities as soon as the new state-of-the-art computing systems arrived in the laboratory. At the same time, a massively parallel computer (DEC 12000) became operational at the BC Systems Corporation in Victoria, and we were the first external user group to install our advanced electromagnetic modeling codes on this powerful machine. Two new Ph.D. students, M. Righi and Q. Zhang joined us in May and July 1992, respectively. T. Hack from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, stayed for six months as an undergraduate research trainee, and Prof. M. Mongiardo of the University of Perugia, Italy, spent three summer months as a Visiting Scientist in our new laboratory.
In spite of the unavoidable interruptions created by the move from Ottawa to Victoria, and the effort spent towards the creation "from scratch" of the new research facilities, the group has managed to prepare nine successful submissions to international conferences. While expecting to grow in the coming months, the present nucleus of researchers has now reached "cruising speed" and is concentrating its energy on its mission and research objectives.