Muhammad Usman Afzal, IEEE M’ (2017), SM (2020), is a visiting lecturer at King’s Own Institute (KOI). Muhammad received a Bachelor's in Electronics Engineering (Hons.) and a Master's in Computational Science and Engineering from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, in 2009 and 2011, respectively. He has obtained his PhD from Macquarie University, Australia, in 2017. During his doctoral research, he developed the concept of near-field phase transformation, which was demonstrated to enhance the directivity of low-gain aperture antennas in an IEEE TAP paper entitled “Dielectric phase-correcting structures for electromagnetic band-gap resonator antennas”. He is also the co-inventor of efficient antenna beam-steering technology referred to as Near-Field Meta-Steering. This technology received the "Highly Commended" certificate in the Five Future-Shaping Research Priorities category at the 2017 Academic Staff Awards at Macquarie University. To commercialize the outcomes of his research, he led a team of colleagues in a CSIRO-sponsored ON Prime 2 in 2017 – a pre-accelerator program designed to commercialize outcomes of academic research in Australia.
Muhammad began his professional career as a Lab Engineer in 2010 at the Research Institute for Microwave & Millimetre-Wave Studies (RIMMS) NUST, Islamabad. In 2012, he was promoted to the position of lecturer, which he continued till Feb 2013. In 2017, after PhD, he was offered a post-doctorate for three years on a project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through the Discovery grant scheme at Macquarie University. He has also worked as a research associate on a University Technology Sydney (UTS) funded research project for two years (2020-2021). Apart from the project-specific research, Muhammad co-supervised seven PhD, three Masters of research, and more than fifteen undergraduate thesis students at Macquarie University and UTS.
He has received several awards, including the most prestigious science prize in Australia - a Eureka - considered the Oscars of Australian Science – in a MetaSteerers Team, at 2023 Eureka Prizes. He has received merit-based scholarships in six out of eight semesters during the undergraduate degree, a scholarship of complete fee waiver during the postgraduate degree, and the international Macquarie Research Excellence (iMQRES) scholarship towards Doctorate study from Macquarie University. He received a competitive travel grant in 2015 to present my research work at a flagship conference under the Antennas and Propagation Society (APS) in Vancouver. He assisted in preparing several grant applications, including a successful ARC discovery grant in 2018. He was the third CI in a team of five who received a grant of more than $20K from the German Academic Exchange Service in a funding scheme “Australia-Germany Joint Research Co-Operation Scheme”. Muhammad is regularly invited to review research articles for top-tier journals and conferences, for the recognition of my efforts and the quality of his reviews, he has received an “Outstanding Reviewer” award from IEEE TAP in 2020 and 2023. He is currently serving as associate editor of IEEE Access (Award-Winning Open Access Journal of IEEE). He has previously served as an editor for special sessions in IEEE Wireless and Propagation Letters and MPDI Electronics.