Alexander Koelpin

Prof. Alexander Koelpin is professor and director of the Institute of High-Frequency Technology at Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), Germany. He received his diploma in Electrical Engineering in 2005, his doctoral degree in 2010, and his habilitation in 2014, all from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany. During his postdoc time with the same university, he built up and lead the Electronic Systems group from 2010 to 2017. From 2017 to 2020, he was Professor and Head of the Chair for Electronics and Sensor Systems at Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg. Since 2020, he has been a full professor and institute director at TUHH.

His research interests include microwave circuits and systems, radar and wireless sensing, wireless communication systems, local positioning, and six-port technology. Prof. Koelpin has authored or co-authored more than 300 scientific publications in these fields and is actively involved in the international research community as a reviewer for leading journals and conferences.

He has held numerous leadership roles within IEEE, including Chair of the IEEE MTT-S Technical Committee MTT-24, Chair of the IEEE MTT-S/AP German Chapter Executive Board. He has also served as Conference Chair of the German Microwave Conference 2020, Technical Program Chair of IEEE Radio and Wireless Week 2021, and General Chair of IEEE Radio and Wireless Week 2023.

Prof. Koelpin’s contributions have been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the IEEE MTT-S Outstanding Young Engineer Award (2016), the ITG Award of the German VDE (2017), and elevation to IEEE Fellow as well as the IEEE Microwave Application Award in 2025.

Abstract:

The growing availability of low-cost integrated radar chipsets allows for increasing penetration of radar in industrial and consumer applications. Especially in the field of contact-free medical monitoring, radar may in the future become a powerful and generic monitoring tool for human vital parameters and biomarkers such as heart and respiration activity. Beyond micromotions, however, additional parameters are accessible, for example the indirect determination of mental stress or indications of an upcoming epileptic seizure.

This talk introduces a different perspective on this topic from the radar point of view, aside from commonly used Doppler or Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar architectures: millimeter-wave interferometry is a special interpretation of Continuous Wave (CW) radar, featuring superior range resolution below the micrometer regime with minimal hardware and algorithmic complexity.

Clinical trials have demonstrated highly reliable heart action monitoring with accuracy and precision comparable to the medical gold standard. However, there are also challenges that must be addressed and will be discussed in this talk, such as large-scale random body movement artifacts, as referred to by the medical radar community.