Faculty Directory

Contact Information

Office:
Atwater Kent Laboratories, 217
Phone: +1-508-831-5448
Fax: +1-508-831-5491
cyganski@wpi.edu

David Cyganski

• Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
• Affiliated with:
  • Robotics Engineering

Since 2000, my work, research, and passion has centered on the Precision Personnel Locator (PPL) for First Responders. I have come to love the community of first responders, including fire fighters and law enforcement, and want to help them by providing a tool that will enhance their ability to effectively and efficiently deal with crisis situations. Beyond locating personnel, the PPL can relay physiological information back to the commanders, providing information that can potentially indicate when a firefighter has reached his or her stress limit. We are also developing sensors to describe the environment fire ground to allow an incident commander to make a split-second predication that a flashover might occur, making it is necessary to get personnel out of a building before it happens. My interests in radar technology, military target recognition, and satellite communications have lead me to apply everything I have ever learned and used in electrical and computer engineering to the PPL project, including signal theory, electromagnetic theory and simulation, software defined radio, and digital signal processing. I consider myself to be part electrical engineer, part mathematician, and part physicist. Physics has become as much a hobby as an intellectual interest—even to the point of creating terrible at-home basement experiments in the name of science. I am an avid comic book collector, a fan of boating, and a video game enthusiast (beating anyone who dares to battle me at Mario Kart Double Dash).