Four straight years of being among the most highly cited researchers in the world

UPDATE: December 2022

When Clarivate Analytics’ released its 2022  list of highly cited researchers, for the fourth year in a row, Thomas Marzetta, Director of NYU WIRELESS, and Founding Director Theodore “Ted” S. Rappaport, the David Lee/Ernst Weber Chaired Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tandon, were featured prominently. 

The pair were among the 23 NYU professors recognized by the organization, which aims to identify researchers who have published papers that rank in the top 1% by citations in their fields over a ten-year period, thus demonstrating their significant contributions and influence.

The two, who helped pave the way for 5G mobile communications, are now exploring futuristic cellular communications for 5G and beyond; the application of the millimeter wave spectrum for vehicular communications; channel modeling for sub-THz transmissions from microcells in urban settings; and the vast possibilities of 6G wireless applications for the cloud, robotics,  medicine, virtual reality, sensors, and many other applications.

The Clarivate honor is not the only one the pair have in common: both were named to the National Academy of Engineering in recent years, for example, and both are longtime fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). 

Original article published November 17, 2021:

Thomas Marzetta, Director of NYU WIRELESS, and Theodore “Ted” S. Rappaport, David Lee/Ernst Weber Chaired Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tandon School of Engineering, are among 24 New York University professors named to Clarivate Analytics’ 2021 Highly Cited Researchers list.

The annual list identifies researchers who have demonstrated significant influence in their fields — which at NYU, range from biology to engineering and economics to public health. The scientists chosen from around the world have published papers that rank in the top 1% by citations in their fields over the past decade (2010-2020) in Clarivate’s Web of Science citation index.

Rappaport, who also holds faculty positions at NYU Courant and in radiology at NYU School of Medicine, pioneered the use of millimeter-wave spectrum for telecommunications. His paper “Millimeter Wave Mobile Communications for 5G Cellular: It Will work!” was a clarion call demonstrating the value — and necessity — of exploiting this underutilized region of the electromagnetic spectrum for future wireless. He is now focused on the tantalizing possibilities of sub-terahertz spectrum radio, key to 6G wireless — and the Center's new area of focus.

Similarly, Marzetta, Distinguished Industry Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, did fundamental research in and developed the Massive MIMO antenna technology, and is probing theoretical limits on radio transmission toward a new generation of antennas to enable 6G.

Marzetta and Rappaport, both recipients of the Radio Club of America’s prestigious Armstrong Award, are not new to the rankings: they were named to Clarivate’s list in 2019 and 2020. Another NYU WIRELESS researcher, Elza Erkip, professor of electrical and computer engineering at NYU Tandon, earned the distinction as well for her prescient work on information theory applied to wireless networks. Additionally, Erkip and Rappaport are both recipients of the IEEE Communications Society's Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award. Erkip, who won the award in 2021, is just the third woman to receive it. Rappaport was honored in 2015.

In other centers, an influential paper on the cyber risks of 3D printing, whose authors included Nikhil Gupta, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Ramesh Karri, professor of electrical and computer engineering — both also members of the NYU Center for Cybersecurity — was the most-read engineering research in any of the journals produced by academic publisher Springer in 2016.