WNCG Faculty Visit Washington, D.C.

by Dr. Jeffrey G. Andrews

Four WNCG faculty members recently toured Washington on July 7-8, 2003. New assistant professors Jeffrey Andrews, Robert Heath, and Sanjay Shakkottai visited Dennis McGregor, the director of communications research at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) on July 7th to discuss research topics of interest to the Navy. Later that afternoon, WNCG Director Ted Rappaport joined them at the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a roundtable with Dr. Gregory Andrews, a Director in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) division. They also met briefly with the overall CISE director, Peter Freeman, to discuss the capabilities of WNCG and the possibility of forming a major research center in wireless networking at the University of Texas at Austin.

The next morning after a late night of intermittent proposal writing and shameless karaoke performances (which cleared out the establishment), the four faculty met with researchers at the Information Operations Technology Center. The team then headed back to Arlington for another afternoon of meetings with NSF program directors. It was a successful visit to Washington, and an important step towards WNCG's goal of becoming a leading center of federally funded interdisciplinary research in wireless networks.