NYU WIRELESS was founded over three years ago by Ted Rappaport as a landmark initiative between academia and corporate partners. Under Ted’s leadership, and with tremendous support from NYU Tandon administration, faculty, and students, we have grown and thrived. Especially important is the industry support that has contributed to the success of NYU WIRELESS. Our strategic plan includes elements to ensure long-term growth of our center, cultivating new leaders, and bringing in fresh thinking. As part of this plan, I am very pleased to accept the appointment as the new Director of NYU WIRELESS. I have been a core part of the leadership team since the center’s inception and am looking forward to overseeing our existing programs, providing expertise and technical leadership, and developing new projects together with our faculty, students, industrial partners and funding agencies. This is truly the most exciting time to be in the wireless world, and I am honored to lead such an impressive group.

Ted Rappaport will remain deeply involved as an associate director and founder of NYU WIRELESS – his passion, creativity and energy will continue to be crucial to our strategy and research. In addition to helping all of us in the center with our work and ensuring that his health is optimized, Ted will focus on the technical issues at the PHY and MAC layers, as well as other important areas.

Ted’s vision has enabled us to develop and mature in such a rapid manner that we have expanded our faculty outreach and activities in a remarkable way. As a result, we are now attracting students who are truly world-class in aptitude and ambition. Our work has blossomed in many areas, extending from the physical layer to the higher layers of the network stack. As examples, NYU WIRELESS recently became part of the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) consortium (Prof. Shiv Panwar is our representative), and we were invited to become part of METIS 2.0 (Sundeep Rangan and Marco Mezzavilla are our representatives).  Addressing and defining commercially relevant problems is really the focus of the center, which aligns well with my background in the industry. While there are other academic wireless research programs, I believe NYU WIRELESS is unique in its close engagement with industry and its potential to influence and impact technology.  Moving forward, I will seek to continue this mission by working closely with all our affiliate members, defining and delivering on projects that can have a technological impact, and develop great students and the next generation of leaders to work in affiliate companies and the industry more broadly.

I look forward to your support as we progress in the months and years to come at NYU WIRELESS.

Sundeep Rangan

Director, NYU WIRELESS