UTAR Lee Kong Chian Faculty of Engineering and Science (LKC FES) academic Prof Ts Dr Lim Eng Hock was elected as the recipient of the AIM Ted Williams Award Year 2022. Prof Lim is the first Malaysian to receive this grand international award established by the Association of Automatic Identification and Mobility, which is based in Pennsylvania.

This award is to recognise his contributions to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technology. Prof Lim attended the award presentation ceremony through an online platform on 8 December 2022.

Prof Lim enthused, “This honour is the collective efforts of my research team. Thank you to my research team, UTAR, and funders for being supportive throughout my research journey, especially in the fields of Antenna Design and RFID Technology. I would like to dedicate this success to my research team, UTAR, and all the funders.” UTAR is a not-for-profit private higher education institution that provides quality education and world-class research. He is also thankful to the Collaborative Research in Engineering, Science and Technology Centre (CREST) and NanoMalaysia Berhad for providing research funds and enabling the establishment of a fruitful university-industry collaboration platform. Through the platforms, Prof Lim has been actively assisting local and multinational industries to strengthen their R&D capabilities. He is also commercialising his research outputs through these useful platforms.

Prof Lim is a world-class expert in RFID Antenna Design.  He has published many impactful technical papers on RFID, mostly in the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, which is the most prestigious peer-reviewed international journal in this discipline. He has proposed many novel design methods for optimising the performances of various metal-mountable tags. Most of the metal-mountable RFID tag antennas in the commercial market now are only able to achieve a read distance of less than 3 metres. Prof Lim has innovated new design techniques that enable the tags’ readability to go beyond 10 metres.

Due to his outstanding academic performance, he was the first Malaysian to be invited to serve as the Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. Currently, he is sitting in the editorial boards of the IEEE Journal of Radiofrequency Identification and ASM Science Journal (Academy Science of Malaysia). He has been elected as the Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Council on Radio Frequency Identification (International) since April 2021. He is also a fellow of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia and the ASEAN Academy of Engineering and Technology.

Named in honour of Ted Williams, an industry innovator, collaborator, and long-time member of the AIM Global Technical Symbology Committee, the award was introduced in 2007 and is presented annually to a professor or student in recognition of their innovative and exceptional contributions to the development of the Automatic Identification and Mobility industry that can further the growth of the industry through their work as a teacher, researcher and entrepreneur.