Nokia funds Graduate Fellowship in Engineering*
Since 1995, Nokia has been generously funding research projects at Rice with about $500,000 annually. Recently, the Finnish company gave Rice an additional $50,000 to fund the Nokia Graduate Fellowship in Engineering for two years.Nokia officials, on campus last week for research discussions, presented the fellowship gift as recognition for the important and growing relationship between Rice and Nokia.
Sidney Burrus, Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, says that Rice and Nokia have forged "one of our most successful university-industrial relationships. It cuts across both research and education and is beneficial to Rice and Nokia. We get ideas from them, they get ideas from us, and we create ideas together."
Sidney Burrus, Dean of the School of Engineering, is presented a check from Jorma Lilleberg, NMP Fellow and Senior Research Manager at Nokia. In the background are, from left: John Terry, a Nokia Research Engineer, Behnaam Aazhang, Director of the Center for Multimedia Communication and Professor of ECE, and Joseph Cavallaro, Associate Professor of ECE.Nokia is an international mobile phone supplier whose areas of research include wireless and wireline telecommunications.
Richard Baraniuk, associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering graduate committee, says the Nokia graduate fellowship will be modeled after a successful Rice graduate student fellowship funded by Texas Instruments. Says Baraniuk, "It will help bring the best students in the world to our program."
Steven Gray, principal scientist at the Nokia Research Center, says that his company looks to Rice both for research collaboration and recruitment. "The research results from supporting Rice have been of great value to Nokia, and we've been able to recruit very fine students," Gray says.
For the past two years, Rice interns working at Nokia have been named the company's international "interns of the year."
Behnaam Aazhang, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of Rice's Center for Multimedia Communications, notes that Rice is working with Nokia on four major research projects: wireless cellular, wireless local area network, a wireless testbed development project, and a quality of service (QoS) network.
* From Rice News, March 2, 2000.
