Wireless Communications Pioneer Ted Rappaport Heading to NYU
The University of Texas at Austin is losing a wireless communications guru to New York University and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
Ted Rappaport currently is the William and Bettye Nowlin Chair of Engineering at UT, where he’s been on the faculty for nine years. He founded UT’s Wireless Networking and Communications Group in 2002. The group has 15 faculty members and more than 140 students dedicated to wireless communications research.
In 2005, Motorola Inc. bought Austin-based Wireless Valley Communications Inc., a developer of wireless networking software that Rappaport founded in 1995.
Rappaport “is one of the best people in the world in wireless communications research and teaching," Ben Streetman, who then was dean of the College of Engineering, told the Austin American-Statesman in 2002. “It was a major coup for the university to be able to recruit him.”
Rappaport will join the faculty of NYU and NYU-Poly next April. He will serve as the David Lee/Ernst Weber Chair of Electrical Engineering at NYU-Poly and will hold professorships at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and NYU’s School of Medicine.
In addition to teaching at NYU-Poly’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and NYU’s Courant Institute, Rappaport will become director of the National Science Foundation’s Wireless Internet Center for Advanced Technology. Five universities, including NYU-Poly and UT, are part of the research center.
“I love startups, and to be invited to build this world-class academic wireless engineering program is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Rappaport said in an NYU news release. “I am thrilled to be on the ground floor at this transformative time in the history of NYU and NYU-Poly, and look forward to bringing the world’s best researchers and corporations to New York City.”
Rappaport was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.
NYU Provost David McLaughlin called Rappaport “an outstanding researcher and an engineer with enormous entrepreneurial energy.”
McLaughlin added: “His presence on the faculty will greatly advance NYU’s global standing in information technology and urban engineering, and bring scholarly strength and leadership to one of the great challenges of our time: integrating technology into solutions to improve the lives of the world’s urban dwellers. Recruiting someone of his stature is a validation of our strategy of investment in NYU-Poly.”
Rappaport holds more than 100 patents and has authored numerous books.
Follow Technorati