Professor Shivendra (“Shiv”) S. Panwar, an NYU WIRELESS faculty member, became the department chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at NYU Tandon on July 1, for a three-year period. Announcing this change, Dean Katepalli R. Sreenivasan said, “I am confident that the department will continue to move along its upward trajectory under his leadership.”

The ECE department is aggressively hiring new faculty, with three new faculty joining this year. It is anticipated that at least another seven faculty will be hired in the next three years. With a planned total of about ten new assistant professors joining the department, Shiv noted that this would energize and strengthen the department.  In addition, with more selective entrance policies at undergraduate, masters and PhD levels, the quality of the student body now compares to the very best schools.  At the same time, programs and courses are in the process of being upgraded to make sure that those graduating have the skills that employers are looking for. Research is on the upswing as well, with a new PhD fellowship program doubling the intake of PhD students.

Shiv will continue working on NYU WIRELESS projects. His interests include redesigning higher layer protocols to take advantage of the huge bandwidth available in the millimeter wave bands, and cellular networks using new full duplex radio technology. Besides NYU WIRELESS, Prof. Panwar’s research is supported by the NSF, InterDigital, Verizon, and the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT). He also just obtained US Army funding for a project on opportunistic communications.