IEEE Honors NYU Professor for Contributions to Cellular Communications

Sundeep Rangan, the recently appointed director of the research center NYU WIRELESS, has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Elevated to Fellow for his contributions to orthogonal frequency-division multiple access cellular communications, Rangan joined the faculty of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in 2010 after co-founding Flarion Technologies, later acquired by Qualcomm. The company, a spinoff of Bell Labs, developed Flash OFDM, the first cellular orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing system. (OFDM is a method of encoding digital data on multiple carrier frequencies, and it is now widely used in broadband digital communications.)

The IEEE grade of Fellow is conferred by the organization’s board of directors upon members with extraordinary records of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields. The total number selected in any one year never exceeds one-tenth of one percent of the total voting membership.

NYU Tandon School of Engineering Dean and President Katepalli R. Sreenivasan said, “The elevation to Fellow of this distinguished faculty member makes the proportion of the tenure/tenure track professors in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering among the highest in the country and indicates the quality of research in the department. Rangan's commitment to solving real-world problems and conducting important collaborative research is worthy of praise, and I congratulate him on receiving this well-deserved recognition.”

The NYU Tandon School of Engineering dates to 1854, when the NYU School of Civil Engineering and Architecture as well as the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (widely known as Brooklyn Poly) were founded. Their successor institutions merged in January 2014 to create a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. In addition to programs at its main campus in downtown Brooklyn, it is closely connected to engineering programs in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai, and it operates business incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn.