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About Allen
Allen Taflove was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering. He received his B.S.E.E. with highest distinction in 1971, M.S.E.E. in 1972, and Ph.D. in 1975 in electrical engineering from Northwestern University, where he earned the Dissertation-Year Cabell Fellowship as an outstanding Ph.D. recipient. After serving as a research engineer at IIT Research Institute from 1975 to 1984, he joined Northwestern as an associate professor in 1984, was tenured in 1986, and promoted to full professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1988. Taflove held the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence from 2000 to 2003 and served as Master of the Lindgren/Slivka Residential College of Science and Engineering from 2000 to 2005. He advised 24 Ph.D. students, many of whom advanced to prominent positions in academia and industry, and served as faculty advisor to the Northwestern Undergraduate Research Journal for 12 years, student chapters of Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi, and originated the Undergraduate Design Competition.
Taflove pioneered the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method for computational electrodynamics, advancing it from his 1975 Ph.D. work and coining the FDTD acronym in a 1980 IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility paper. His textbook, Computational Electrodynamics: The Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method (Artech House, 1995; second edition 2000 and third edition 2005 with Susan C. Hagness), ranks seventh among the most-cited books in physics with more than 20,000 Google Scholar citations. He edited Advances in Computational Electrodynamics: The Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method (1998) and Advances in FDTD Computational Electrodynamics: Photonics and Nanotechnology (2013), authored or co-authored approximately 250 journal papers, conference papers, and book chapters, and held 13 U.S. patents. FDTD became the primary method for modeling complex electromagnetic problems across frequencies from extremely low to optical, enabling applications in radar cross-sections, wireless communications, photonics, and biophotonics for early cancer detection in collaboration with biomedical engineering professor Vadim Backman. His accolades include IEEE Life Fellow (1990, the first for FDTD), IEEE Electromagnetics Award (2014), Optical Society Fellow (2018), Sigma Xi Fellow (inaugural cohort, 2020), Chen-To Tai Distinguished Educator Award (2010), multiple Northwestern Teacher of the Year and Advisor of the Year awards, and induction into the Amateur Radio Hall of Fame (2011).
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