Jin-Fa Lee, professor at Ohio State’s College of Engineering, is a leading authority in computational electromagnetics He is credited for developing the first ever commercial-level toolset, later marketed under the program name HFSS. For years, such codes, based on the finite element method, were not possible due to solution convergence difficulties, that is, the numerical solution was untrustworthy. Lee overcame this issue by introducing novel vector finite elements that avoided the spurious modes or nonphysical solutions, which plagued the solvers originally adapted from mechanical to electrical engineering applications. Due to Lee’s contributions, the finite element code HFSS is now the most successful in the world, and the standard package used to design radio frequency circuits and communication/radar/radio devices.
Joining Ohio State’s faculty and the ElectroScience Laboratory in 2000, Lee is an IEEE fellow and was awarded Ohio State’s Distinguished Scholar Award in 2012.