Ted Rappaport, Founding Director of NYU WIRELESS, among the top researchers in the world

Theodore (Ted) S. Rappaport, the David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and Founding Director of NYU WIRELESS, a premier center for telecommunications research, is one of the nation’s — and world’s — top researchers, according to Research.com, which ranks researchers annually by their Microsoft Academic Graph h-index and number of citations.

Rappaport, in Research.com’s 8th annual ranking, ranks fifteenth in the U.S., and twenty-sixth worldwide among scientists in the category of Electronics and Electrical Engineering. 

While he is perhaps best known for demonstrating the versatility and power of the millimeter-wave spectrum for wireless telecommunications, his purview is much broader, including pioneering research and thought leadership paving the way for current wireless and making possible new applications and systems for the future. 

Recent papers of which he is co-author include investigations of position location for futuristic cellular communications for 5G and beyond; research into the application of millimeter wave for vehicular communications; channel modeling for sub-THz transmissions from microcells in urban settings; and a recently-submitted paper on the reliability and security aspects for positioning of autonomous unmanned aircraft.

Rappaport, a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and member of the National Academy of Engineering, and whom the Radio Club of America honored with the Edwin H. Armstrong Award in 2018, founded two other academic wireless research centers. Along with NYU WIRELESS, the wireless centers at Virginia Tech and The University of Texas have produced thousands of engineers and educators since 1990.

An academic affiliate of the NYU Courant School of Mathematics, and the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, Rappaport has co-authored over 300 papers and twenty books, including the most cited books on wireless communications, adaptive antennas, wireless simulation, and millimeter-wave communications. He co-founded two wireless companies, TSR Technologies and Wireless Valley Communication, which were sold to publicly traded companies, and he has advised many others. 

• Earlier in his career he provided fundamental knowledge of indoor wireless channels used to create the first Wi-Fi standard, called IEEE 802.11, and he conducted fundamental work that led to the first U.S. digital cell phone standards.
• He and his students engineered the world’s first public Wi-Fi hotspots
• Through comprehensive channel modeling research in urban and rural settings he proved the viability of millimeter waves for mobile communications
• The global wireless industry adopted his vision for 5th generation (5G) cell phone networks. 
• NYUSIM: A globally adopted open source 5G Channel Simulator he developed has been downloaded by over 100,000 users. wireless.engineering.nyu.edu/5g-millimeter-wave-channel-modeling-software

NYU WIRELESS, under the direction of Thomas Marzetta, is now focused on the next generation of telecommunications, 6G, with investigations into the many possibilities of wireless through exploitation of sub-terahertz (THz) spectrum, new ways to target transmissions, wireless applications for the cloud, robotics,  medicine, virtual reality, sensors, and many other applications.