J. Nicholas Laneman

November 5, 2008  - ECE is proud to host Professor J. Nicholas (Nick) Laneman as the eleventh TI Visiting Professor since the inception of the program.  As part of its 1996 $7 million gift to Rice, Texas Instruments established an endowment to bring professors from other leading universities to Rice each year.  The TI professors teach courses and participate in TI/Rice collaborative research in the fields of electrical and computer engineering.

Laneman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame.  His research interests span the general area of wireless communications and networking, with specific interests from information theory to signal processing algorithms to software radio.  He is author or co-author of over 60 publications and is inventor or co-inventor on five U.S. patents. He has served as a Guest Editor of Special Issues in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, and is a member of IEEE, ASEE, and Sigma Xi.

Nick earned the Ph.D. and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and in Computer Science from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.  He received a 2006 Presidential Early-Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a 2006 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, a 2003 Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, and the 2001 MIT EECS Harold L. Hazen Graduate Teaching Award.

While at Rice, Nick will focus on information theory for wireless systems, compare experimental wireless research platforms such as software radio and WARP, and explore Connexions®.