Professor Jeff Andrews Receives NSF Career Award

WNCG Associate Director Prof. Jeff Andrews was chosen as a recipient of this year's National Science Foundation CAREER award.  The NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) recognizes promising young (untenured) faculty members and provides funding to support their research over a 5 year period. CAREER awardees are selected in a highly competitive peer-review process on the basis of creative research and teaching plans that if successful, will impact their field.   Dr. Andrews's award was in the amount of $400,000.

Dr. Andrews proposal was entitled "Advancing the Theory and Design of Decentralized Wireless Networks", and is focused on understanding the fundamental performance limits and characteristics of ad hoc wireless networks, particularly at the physical layer.  Ad hoc networks are far more challenging to design and analyze than centralized (for example cellular) networks due to the distributed nature of the nodes, and the unpredictable interference experienced by the receivers in the network.  As a result, despite increasing interest, ad hoc networks have not become widely deployed. If successful, his research plan will help provide theoretically-grounded guidelines for this exciting emerging application of wireless technology.

Dr. Andrews received the B.S. in Engineering with High Distinction from Harvey Mudd College in 1995, and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1999 and 2002, respectively. He developed Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems as an engineer at Qualcomm from 1995 to 1997, and has consulted for the WiMAX Forum, Microsoft, Palm, Ricoh, ADC, and NASA.  He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Along with Arun Ghosh and Rias Muhamed of AT&T Labs, he is co-author of the Prentice-Hall book, Fundamentals of WiMAX, which will become available in late February.