Welcome to the IEEE San Diego Section

IEEE San Diego Section, established 1939.

Our organization is responsible for coordinating IEEE activities for much of Southern California.  The San Diego IEEE area has a diverse technical and scientific community in industry, academia, and defense.

We welcome all interested parties to attend our programs and events. Please see our San Diego Section Events Feed at right. Click the links to find out more about the particular event and reserve your spot.

Want even more engineering events in San Diego? See Enrique’s List below (scroll down).

News

Meet Your 2026 IEEE San Diego Section Officer Candidates

The IEEE San Diego Section is pleased to announce the candidates for our 2026 Executive Committee elections. We encourage all members to learn about these outstanding volunteers and participate in the upcoming election, to be held 8 December through 22 December 2025.

Chair Candidates

Dr. Upal Mahbub

Dr. Upal Mahbub is a Staff Engineer in the Multimedia R&D Lab at Qualcomm Technologies in San Diego, where he develops hardware-efficient deep learning algorithms for extended reality (XR) applications. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland College Park, and B.Sc./M.Sc. degrees in EEE from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET).

Dr. Mahbub currently serves as Chair of the IEEE San Diego Section and Chair of the IEEE Computer Society San Diego Chapter, where he has significantly increased chapter activities and engagement. His research spans computer vision, machine learning, active authentication, and face/object detection for mobile and XR platforms. He holds nine granted patents and has co-edited the book Computer Vision: Challenges, Trends, and Opportunities.

He is a recipient of the 2024 IEEE Computer Society Top 30 Early Career Professionals award, the 2024 Outstanding Engineering Service Award from the San Diego County Engineering Council, and the 2024 Early Career Distinguished Alumni Award from UMD’s A. James Clark School of Engineering.

Bansi Patel

Bansi Patel is Owner and Consultant at BRP Consultants, bringing over 30 years of experience in product safety, regulatory compliance, and program management. He previously worked as a Safety & Regulatory Engineer at Hewlett Packard (HP) in San Diego, where he managed worldwide product certification for printers, power supplies, chargers, and battery packs.

Bansi has extensive IEEE leadership experience, particularly within the Product Safety Engineering Society (PSES). He currently serves as IEEE San Diego Section Executive Committee Member At Large (2024–2025), IEEE PSES Emeritus (2025–2027), and IEEE PSES Board of Governors-at-Large (2018–2023, 2025–2027). He served as IEEE PSES San Diego Chapter Chair from 2019 to 2025 and as PSES Vice President of Conferences from 2020 to 2024, including serving as General Chair for ISPCE 2021.

His technical expertise spans UPS systems, information technology equipment (ITE), and global environmental compliance including WEEE, RoHS, and REACH directives. He actively participates in standards development with UL, CSA, NEMA, and IEC organizations.

Vice Chair Candidates

Dr. Md Nafee Al Islam

Dr. Md Nafee Al Islam is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Diego’s Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame, where he worked in Jane Cleland-Huang’s drone lab on autonomous systems and software engineering for cyber-physical systems.

His research focuses on artificial intelligence, data analytics, software engineering, and machine learning, with particular expertise in small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS). He has developed adaptive monitoring frameworks for UAV anomaly detection, designed deep learning-based LSTM Autoencoders for flight diagnostics (achieving up to 220% improvement in F1 scores over rule-based methods), and led the RESAM requirements process for building anomaly detection models. His work on the Drone Response software product line addresses rapid configuration and deployment of multi-sUAS missions for emergency response scenarios.

Dr. Al Islam was recently elected Chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society San Diego Chapter.

Dr. Paragkumar (Parag) Thadesar

Dr. Paragkumar (Parag) Thadesar is a Staff Engineer at Qualcomm in San Diego, where he has worked since 2015 on RF front-end module and power amplifier design, as well as innovative RF packaging techniques. He received his M.S. (2011) and Ph.D. (2015) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech, where he was a member of the Integrated 3D Systems Research Group under Professor Muhannad Bakir.

His Ph.D. research focused on low-loss through-silicon via (TSV) technologies for silicon interposer packaging. He developed photodefined polymer-embedded vias that demonstrated approximately 80% reduction in TSV insertion loss at 50 GHz compared to state-of-the-art approaches. He was awarded an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship (2014–2015) and received a Best in Session Award at the 2013 SRC TECHCON for his work on novel polymer-embedded vias.

Parag is active in IEEE at multiple levels: he serves as Chapter Chair for the IEEE Electronics Packaging Society (EPS) San Diego Chapter, is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology (TCPMT), an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices (TED), and a member of the IEEE MTT-S Technical Committee on Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Packaging, Interconnect and Integration (TC-16).

Secretary Candidate

Dr. Lai Xu

Dr. Lai Xu is a Senior Staff Engineer and SoC Architect in the Qualcomm Platform Architecture (QPA) group in San Diego, where he has worked since 2020. He received his Ph.D. (2010, Outstanding Graduate) and M.S. (2006) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of New Mexico.

He brings over 10 years of semiconductor experience in wireless connectivity SoC development, with expertise spanning system architecture, ASIC front-end and back-end design, FPGA prototyping, and lab testing, with particular emphasis on low-power design. Prior to Qualcomm, he spent 9 years in startups including Ubilite (ultra-low power 802.11n SoC for IoT) and TensorComm/Adeptence (802.11ad WiGig physical layer). His earlier career included data mining research at The Mind Research Network, where he created source-based morphometry methods using Independent Component Analysis for brain network extraction from MRI images.

Dr. Xu has served as Secretary of the IEEE San Diego Section since May 2021 and is a member of the IEEE Consultants’ Network of San Diego.

Treasurer Candidate

Dr. Hua Zhu

Dr. Hua Zhu is currently Principal Scientist at Trellisware Technologies. Dr. Zhu has been the PI/Co-PI or technical lead of various R&D projects on tactical and commercial networks. He has co-authored over 50 patents and technical publications. Dr. Zhu served on the organizing committees or technical program committees of various IEEE conferences.

Cast Your Vote!

These candidates represent the diverse technical expertise and dedicated volunteer spirit that makes the IEEE San Diego Section one of the most active in the country. We encourage all members to participate in the upcoming election. 

John Kroon

San Diego Section at the Del Mar Electronics and Manufacturing Show April 23, 2025

San Diego Section at the San Diego County Engineering Council Awards Banquet 2025

Annual Awards Banquet 2025

Here are some of our Awards Banquet honorees. We had a wonderful time celebrating our successes in 2024. Please join us in 2025!

Enrique’s List