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DR. JOE PEKAREK – Founder and Chief Technology Officer

Working on the development of advanced MMICs at Hughes Aircraft in the early 1990s, Dr. Pekarek was frustrated by the inadequacy of many of the leading high-frequency EDA tools available at the time. In 1994 he returned to school to earn his Ph.D. and simultaneously launched AWR with the intent of developing a completely new approach to designing high-frequency circuits. The combination of his 10 years of experience in microwave hardware design with his extensive background in development of object-oriented software for linear and nonlinear circuit simulation resulted in AWR's highly successful flagship product, Microwave Office® design suite.

Dr. Pekarek earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from California State University, Northridge, with a specialization in electromagnetics and microwave circuits, and his Ph.D. in Numerical Electromagnetics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with minors in Scientific Computing and Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Pekarek holds a patent for a coplanar waveguide quadrature coupler he developed while at Hughes Aircraft Company. In 2005 he was named IEEE MTT-S Outstanding Young Engineer of the Year in recognition of his innovation in software design and his outstanding achievement in entrepreneurship.