Professional Experience

• University of Maryland - College Park, MD (August 1997 -- Present)
  Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept.

• Purdue University - West Lafayette , IN (August 1992 -- May 1997)
• Graduate Research Assistant in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept.
  Assisted in a project to build and field test a high performance modem architecture for 4 kHz channels in the 220-222 MHz spectral band. The modulation scheme optimizes the use of transmitter antenna diversity, forward error control coding, pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM), and the statistical characteristics of the received signal.
• Teaching Assistant in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept.
  Teaching assistant for various senior level laboratory and lecture courses covering the fundamentals of frequency domain analysis, analog and digital filter design, analog and digital communications, and image and speech processing. My responsibilities included preparing and grading lab quizzes, writing homework solutions, grading homeworks and tests, and holding office hours.

• NCR Corp. - Dayton , OH . (May 1988 -- August 1991)
  Co-op Engineer in the Workstation Products Division

Worked in all stages of product development. This included testing a multiport adapter board, developing diagnostic software for a Local Area Network, and researching new product ideas.

Professional Involvement

• Performed 70 hours of consulting work for Sophia Communications, Inc.
• Served on various departmental and university wide committees, including:
• Graduate Studies and Research Committee which evaluates applications for prospective graduate students, reviews grad schhol rules, hears petitions
• Undergraduate Affairs Committee which reviews undergraduate requirements and curriculum.
• Student Conduct Committee
• Reviewed papers for
• IEEE Trans on Commununications
• IEEE Trans on Signal Processing
• IEEE Journal on Select Areas in Communications
• IEEE Communications Letters
• Served on an NSF CAREER panel.

Honors, Awards, and Achievements

• AFCEA (Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Assoc.) Fellowship, 1995
• B.S.E.E. with Highest Distinction, Purdue University , 1992
• Licensed Engineer in Training (ET00920423), 1992
• Harvey Wiley Residence Hall Scholarship, 1988
• Richard E. Meyer Scholarship, 1987--1991
• U.S. Citizen

Course and Laboratory Development

• I introduced a new special topics course, ENEE 729G, into the curriculum which gives extensive coverage to synchronization, equalization, and phase-locked loops. Although these topics are vital for any communications system, they only received superficial treatment in pre-existing courses.
• I developed a computer classroom (room layout, multimedia and computer facilities, and software configuration) to serve educational needs in communications and signal processing.
• Along with Steve Tretter, I revised the communications design laboratory (ENEE 428) to be a capstone design course (ENEE 408F) in which students propose and solve their own design problem in the general area of communications. We also converted the lab from the TI C30 DSP to the TI C6701 DSP. Activities included generating a new set of lectures, creating basic lab exercises, and generating example projects for the students.

Research Interests:

General Research Interests

My research interests are in the broad area of physical layer communications and signal processing.

• Digital communications theory

• Fading channel communications

• Synchronization (carrier, symbol, and frame) of communications systems

• Sensor array signal processing

Wireless Narrowband Data Communications

I assisted in a project to build and field test a high performance modem architecture for the 4 kHz channels allocated in the 220-222 MHz spectral band. This architecture provides greater than 12 kbits/s transmission rate for land mobile applications. The modulation scheme optimizes the use of transmitter antenna diversity, forward error control coding, pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM), and the statistical characteristics of the received signal. The resulting system achieved greater than 3 bits/s/Hz bandwidth efficiency in wireless land mobile radio communication. Extensive field and laboratory testing validated the theory. The transmission system was implemented in hardware and the receiver system was implemented in a combination of hardware and high level software.

• Michael P. Fitz, James V. Krogmeier, Jimm Grimm, Jerome A. Gansman, Tim Magnusen, and Tai-Ann Chen, ``The 220 MHz ITS Spectral Allocation: Potential, Pitfalls and Applications,'' IEEE Communications Magazine , Vol. 34, No. 10, pages 42-54, October 1996.
• Jimm Grimm, Michael P. Fitz, James V. Krogmeier, Tai-Ann Chen, Tim Magnusen, Jerome A. Gansman, Wen-Yi Kuo ``High Efficiency Narrowband Wireless Modems for ITS Applications,'' Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Journal Vol. 3(4), pages 333-352, 1997.
• Michael P. Fitz, James V. Krogmeier, Jimm Grimm, Tai-Ann Chen, Jerome A. Gansman, Matt Roos, Brett Emsley, Doug Blackburn, and Charles Muh, ``ITS Wireless Narrowband Land Mobile Data Communications'' in: Proc. Forty-Seventh Annual IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference , pages 909-913, Phoenix, AZ (May 1997).

Frame Synchronization

Pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM) is a method to reduce the effects of fading in mobile communications by periodically inserting known symbols in the data stream. The receiver uses these pilot symbols to derive its amplitude and phase reference. This project developed synchronization algorithms to locate the known pilot symbols in the data stream after transmission over a frequency non-selective, slow, Rayleigh fading channel. Both optimum and sub-optimum frame synchronization techniques were developed and analyzed through simulations and a theoretical performance analysis.

• Jerome A. Gansman, Michael P. Fitz, and James V. Krogmeier, ``Optimum and Suboptimum Frame Synchronization for Pilot Symbol Assisted Modulation,'' IEEE Transactions on Communications , Vol. 45, No. 10, pages 1327-1337, October 1997.
• Jerome A. Gansman, Michael P. Fitz, and James V. Krogmeier, ``A Comparative Study of a Class of PSAM Frame Synchronizers,'' International Journal of Wireless Information Networks , Vol. 4, No. 1, 1997, pages 7-20.
• Jerome A. Gansman, Michael P. Fitz, and James V. Krogmeier, ``Frame Synchronization for Pilot Symbol Assisted Modulation,'' in: Proc. Thirty-Third Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing , pages 235-244, Monticello, IL (October 1995).
• Jerome A. Gansman, Michael P. Fitz, and James V. Krogmeier, ``Frame Synchronization for PSAM on Rayleigh Fading Channels,'' in: Proc. of the 29th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers , pages 260-264, Pacific Grove, CA (November 1995).
• Jerome A. Gansman, Michael P. Fitz, and James V. Krogmeier, ``Maximum Likelihood Frame Synchronization for PSAM,'' in: Proc. Forty-Seventh Annual IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference , pages 1054-1058, Phoenix , AZ (May 1997).

PSAM Aided Carrier Synchronization with Non-Uniform Frame Structures

PSAM is used mainly to estimate the fading induced multiplicative distortion in frequency non-selective slow Rayleigh fading. Typically, the bandwidth of the Weiner filter used in the estimator is widened to accommodate a carrier mismatch between the transmitter and receiver. This project showed that modifying the PSAM frame structure to include consecutive pilot symbols and compensating for the frequency offset prior to Wiener filtering greatly improves the system performance. Optimum and reduced complexity frequency estimators were examined along with various non-uniform frame structures.

• Jerome A. Gansman, James V. Krogmeier, and Michael P. Fitz, ``Single Frequency Estimation with Non-Uniform Sampling,'' Proc. Thirtieth Annual Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers , pages 399-404, Pacific Grove, CA (November 1996).
• Jerome A. Gansman, Herman Lo, and Diane lee ``Further Synchronization Results for PSAM Systems'' Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, 2000 , pages: 140-143
• Herman Lo, Diane lee, and Jerome A. Gansman ``A Study of Non-Uniform Pilot Spacing for PSAM,'' IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2000 pages 322-325.

Sensor Array Processing

This project explored reduced complexity direction finding algorithms for two dimensional sensor arrays. A beamspace version of ESPRIT was developed for uniform rectangular arrays which supports closed-form 2D angle estimation, automatically couples the two components of the source directions, and works with any front end beamformer. The proposed algorithm is based on the observation that beamspace noise eigenvectors can be transformed to vectors which are bandpass and have spectral nulls at the in-band source locations. This facilitates multirate processing (involving modulation to baseband, filtering, and decimation) and yields a space with dimensionality equal to the number of beams used to probe the subband, rather than the number of elements in the sensor array. The MUSIC algorithm can be applied to this noise subspace. Alternatively, a transformation matrix can be computed a priori which maps the beamspace signal eigenvectors to the corresponding signal subspace which has the ESPRIT structure. The TLS-ESPRIT algorithm is then modified to obtain the two directions for each source from a single eigenvalue-eigenvector pair. Hence, they are automatically coupled. Computer simulations and a theoretical performance were used to demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm.

• Jerome A. Gansman, Michael D. Zoltowski, and James V. Krogmeier, ``Multidimensional Multirate DOA Estimation in Beamspace,'' IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing Vol. 44, No. 11, pages 2780-2792, November 1996.
• Jerome A. Gansman, Michael D. Zoltowski, and James V. Krogmeier, ``2-D Angle Estimation in Beamspace Featuring Multidimensional Multirate Eigenvector Processing,'' Proc. of the 28th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers , pages 785-789, Pacific Grove, CA (November 1994).