A New IEEE Award Honours UVic's Maria Stuchly

The IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society has created a new award in memory of Maria Stuchly, recognizing individuals or teams whose work in antennas and propagation has meaningfully advanced bioelectromagnetic science, engineering, or technology. It's a fitting tribute to a researcher whose own career helped define that field, much of it built at the University of Victoria.

Born in Warsaw in 1939, Stuchly lost her father in the Second World War and spent time with her mother in a German internment camp before the war ended. She studied electronics engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology, then completed a PhD through the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1970.

She spent the next two decades in Manitoba and then Ottawa, where she advised Health and Welfare Canada on electromagnetic field exposure standards for 15 years and served as founding director of the University of Ottawa's Institute of Medical Engineering. In 1992, she and her husband, Stan Stuchly, both joined UVic, where she was named a full professor and Industrial Research Chair in 1994. Two years later, she became the first woman elected vice president of the International Union of Radio Science.

At UVic, her research helped lay the groundwork for technologies still in use today, including work with former doctoral student Elise Fear on microwave imaging for breast cancer detection. She published more than 180 journal papers over her career, served as president of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, and was named an IEEE Fellow in 1991 for her contributions to understanding electromagnetic interactions with biological systems. She retired as professor emerita in 2005 and died in 2022.

The new IEEE AP-S Maria Stuchly Award in Bio-electromagnetics joins a growing list of tributes to Stuchly's legacy, and will be presented annually at the Society's flagship summer symposium, with the first award expected as early as next year.