Indian American professor Nambi Seshadri receives Alexander Graham Bell Medal

- ADVERTISEMENT -

NEW YORK – Indian American Nambi Seshadri has received the Alexander Graham Bell Medal from the IEEE, in field of communications and networking.

According to a press release, Seshadri received the 2018 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal for his “contributions to the theory and practice of wireless communications.”

“We are delighted with the news of this great honor for Dr. Seshadri. Networking and wireless communications are driving the fourth industrial revolution, and Dr. Seshadri’s work is at the forefront of it. This medal is a testament to how Rensselaer graduates are changing the world for the better,” said Shekhar Garde, the Dean of Rensselaer School of Engineering, where Seshadri graduated from in 1986.

Seshadri was the senior vice president and CTO of the broadband and connectivity group at Broadcom Corporation, until January 2016.

While there, he was responsible for many of the wireless initiatives such as spearheading the development of technologies like 2G, 3G, and 4G cellular communications, mobile multimedia, low-power WiFi, and many others.

Prior to joining Broadcom Corporation, Seshadri was a longtime member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Lab Laboratories and was the head of communications research at AT&T Shannon Labs.

At Bell Labs, Seshadri was asked to work on reliable digital speech communications for what is known today as 2G cellular systems.

He also devised methods to analyze the effect of wireless channel impairments on state-of-the-art speech coders and built novel error-protection schemes that ensured reliable speech communications, along with Carl-Erik Sundberg, Richard Cox, and Joachim Hagenauer.

A decade later, Seshadri and his colleagues pioneered techniques for wireless communications using multiple transmit antennas, which created a new field of wireless communications called space-time coding and has influenced the development of cellular as well as Wi-Fi systems that we have been using,

In 2000, Seshadri was elected as a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), he was then elected to the National Academy of Engineering (USA) in 2012 and as a foreign member of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2013.

Seshadri holds approximately 200 patents and is the co-recipient of the 1999 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award for his paper with Vahid Tarokh and Robert Calderbank on space-time codes.

His JSAC paper on space-time coding modems was selected by the IEEE Communication Society for publication in “The Best of the Best: Fifty Years of Communications and Networking Research” in 2003.

Currently, Seshadri is an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of California in San Diego and serves as the consulting chief technologist to Quantenna Communications as well as an adviser to several startups.

Seshadri earned his B.E. degree in electronics and communications from Regional Engineering College (now NITT), in Tiruchirapalli, India (1982) and his M.S. (1984) along with his Ph.D. (1986) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.