In 1978 I decided that my career would be more interesting if I got a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, so I enrolled for that purpose at University of Houston. My former Rice classmate Stuart Long was a professor there, and I chose to enter his area of research, antennas. Radio-frequency engineering suited me well--enough mathematical complexity to be challenging, yet very practical in its applications. I enjoyed delving into the arcane world of impedance matching, Smith charts, propagation modes, scattering parameters, loss tangents, polarization currents, and space harmonics. My dissertation in 1983 was entitled "The Resonant Dielectric Antenna--Experiment and Theory." Stuart and I published the first refereed-journal paper on the DRA (Dielectric Resonator Antenna), a paper which has been cited many times by subsequent researchers.
An excerpt from a paper "Hemispherical Resonant Dielectric Antenna" that Stuart and I published in Electronics Letters, Aug. 2, 1984.