Elza Erkip, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, will be the 2016 recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Women in Communications Engineering (WICE) Award for her outstanding technical work in communications engineering and for bringing a high degree of visibility to the field.

The award will be presented on December 4, 2016, at the Third Women’s Workshop on Communications and Signal Processing, held in conjunction with IEEE GLOBECOM, a flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) and the world’s largest annual gathering of communications engineering professionals from academia, industry, and government.

Erkip, a fellow of the IEEE, has received many other honors from the group, and she was recently elected second vice president of the IEEE Information Theory Society; she is scheduled to ascend to the presidency in 2018.

She received the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Paper Prize in 2004, the IEEE International Conference on Communications’ Communication Theory Symposium Best Paper Award in 2007, and the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication in 2013. She was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 2013 to 2014 and has held numerous editorship and organizational roles in IEEE publications and conferences over the course of her career.

Additionally, Erkip has been elected to the Science Academy Society of Turkey and was among the Thomson Reuters 2014 and 2015 Editions of Highly Cited Researchers. Early in her career, she was selected by the National Science Foundation as one of the country’s promising young researchers receiving its CAREER Award.

“It’s an incredible honor to be given the WICE Award,” Erkip said. “I am proud to be a member of IEEE Communications Society and to be of service to its Women in Communications Engineering Committee. To be recognized by my fellow engineers and researchers by this prestigious award is very gratifying.”

As a faculty member of the research center NYU WIRELESS, Erkip has conducted work that has made significant advances in communications technology. She is one of the pioneers of cooperative networking, and more recently she has been working on 5G wireless systems.

“Professor Erkip is an enormous credit to the school — and not only because of the honors she continually accrues,” Dean of Engineering Katepalli R. Sreenivasan said. “Her active involvement in the IEEE proves her devotion to the scientific community, and her tireless work to ensure the widespread availability of wireless service proves her commitment to placing technology in service to society. Those are the ideals that we hold in high esteem here at NYU Tandon, and Professor Erkip perfectly embodies them.”