Rising Star in Wireless Technology: Ruth Gebremedhin Wins Prestigious Marconi Society Award
Ruth Gebremedhin, a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate at NYU Tandon, has been named a 2025 Paul Baran Young Scholar by the Marconi Society, one of the nation’s most prestigious honors in information and communications technology. The award recognizes her innovative research and efforts to push the boundaries of what's physically possible in wireless communications.
Among the questions Gebremedhin's work tackles is one of vital importance to the billions of people in the world who rely on wireless networks: How powerful can wireless technology actually get?
Under the mentorship of Thomas L. Marzetta, the former director of NYU WIRELESS and the originator of Massive MIMO (one of the cornerstones of fifth-generation wireless technology), she's been exploring the ultimate limits imposed by physics and nature on wireless communication systems. Her research spans cutting-edge areas of the wireless physical layer, combining wave propagation, information theory, and machine learning. But what sets her work apart is its focus on unconventional approaches that challenge traditional assumptions about communications.
One of Gebremedhin's most intriguing research projects explores an unlikely medium for data transmission: heat. While the mathematics of heat conduction has been studied for centuries, its potential as a communication channel has only recently garnered serious attention.
Gebremedhin's work demonstrates that thermal conduction can be analyzed as a linear system, similar to conventional electromagnetic communication channels. However, the thermal channel exhibits unique properties: its capacity scales quadratically with spatial dimensions, meaning that shrinking the system from centimeter-scale to micrometer-scale could improve channel capacity by a factor of 100 million. This dramatic scaling makes thermal communication particularly promising for intra-chip data transfer, where traditional electromagnetic approaches face increasing challenges.
Gebremedhin is also pioneering work on evanescent waves in near-field wireless communication. These "invisible" electromagnetic waves decay rapidly with distance but can carry significant information in specific directions. She has developed novel computational methods to analyze how these waves can be leveraged for improved beamforming and spatial multiplexing in next-generation antenna systems.
The work is particularly timely as antenna designers increasingly turn to closely spaced arrays and metasurface-based systems – technologies that can actively exploit evanescent wave properties for enhanced performance.
A Well-Rounded Engineer
The winner of a Nokia Bell Labs' Outstanding Innovation Award, Gebremedhin completed her undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at NYU Abu Dhabi before pursuing her master's and doctoral studies at Tandon.
Outside of the classroom and lab, she enjoys learning languages, listening to podcasts, and solving mechanical puzzles — pursuits that reflect the same curiosity and problem-tackling mindset that drives her research.
The Paul Baran Young Scholar Award, named after one of the pioneers of digital communication networks, represents an extraordinary achievement for her in a highly competitive process. For Gebremedhin, it's recognition not just of past accomplishments, but of the promise her work holds for the future of wireless technology. It’s a future in which the fundamental limits of communication may be far beyond what we currently imagine possible.
