Wireless communications and networking

John R. Pierce

John R. Pierce (1910–2002) was an American electrical engineer at Bell Labs, called the father of communications satellites Echo and Telstar, who also coined the name transistor.

John Stone Stone

John Stone Stone (1869–1943) was an American electrical engineer whose tuned wireless patents the Supreme Court held in 1943 to have anticipated Marconi's four-circuit radio patent.

John Vincent Lawless Hogan

John Vincent Lawless Hogan (1890–1960) was an American radio engineer who helped found the Institute of Radio Engineers and founded the station that became WQXR.

Jonathan Zenneck

Jonathan Zenneck (1871–1959) was a German physicist who helped establish the first wireless telegraphy link to Heligoland in 1900 and wrote the standard early radio textbook.

K.J. Ray Liu

K.J. Ray Liu is an electrical engineer and University of Maryland professor who pioneered wireless sensing using Wi-Fi signals, founded Origin Wireless, and served as 2022 IEEE President.

Kaushik Chowdhury is an Indian-born American wireless networking researcher who won the PECASE award and holds the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Memorial Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

Khaled Ben Letaief

Khaled Ben Letaief is a Tunisian-born wireless communications researcher at HKUST, elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2021 for adaptive resource allocation work foundational to 4G cellular systems.

Lawrence C. F. Horle

Lawrence C. F. Horle (1892–1950) was an American electrical engineer who led radio standardization, served as IRE president in 1940, and received the IRE Medal of Honor in 1948.

Leonard F. Fuller

Leonard F. Fuller (1890–1987) was an American electrical engineer who, as chief engineer of the Federal Telegraph Company, developed high-power Poulsen arc transmitters used by the United States Navy for long-distance radio telegraphy.

Lin Cai

Lin Cai is a Canadian researcher in wireless communications and networking, President's Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Victoria since 2005.

Martin Cooper (engineer)

Martin Cooper, born in 1928, is an American engineer who led Motorola's team in making the first public handheld cellular phone call, in New York in 1973.

Moe Z. Win

Moe Z. Win is an American electrical engineer, the Robert R. Taylor Professor at MIT, known for ultra-wideband radio research and the paper "Fundamental Limits of Wideband Localization."

Peder Oluf Pedersen

Peder Oluf Pedersen (1874–1941) was a Danish engineer and physicist who co-developed the Poulsen arc radio transmitter and the telegraphone magnetic recorder with Valdemar Poulsen.

Per K. Enge

Per K. Enge (Per Kristian Enge, 1953–2018) was a Norwegian-born electrical engineer and Stanford professor who directed the Stanford GPS Lab and led the design of WAAS and maritime DGPS.

Rajiv Laroia

Rajiv Laroia is a wireless communications engineer who founded Flarion Technologies, whose OFDMA-based all-IP mobile broadband system became a foundation for 4G LTE, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2021.

Reinaldo Augusto Valenzuela

Reinaldo Augusto Valenzuela is a Chilean-born wireless researcher who directs Wireless Communications Research at Nokia Bell Labs and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017.

Richard H. Frenkiel

Richard H. Frenkiel, born in 1943, is an American engineer who helped design the first US cellular telephone system at Bell Labs and later taught at Rutgers.

Robert A. Scholtz

Robert A. Scholtz is an American electrical engineer and Fred H. Cole Professor at the University of Southern California, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 for contributions to spread-spectrum and ultra-wideband communication.

Robert Metcalfe

Robert Metcalfe, also known as Bob Metcalfe, is an American engineer and entrepreneur who invented Ethernet at Xerox PARC in 1973, founded 3Com, and won the 2022 Turing Award.

Robert W. Heath

Robert W. Heath Jr. is an electrical engineer working on wireless communication and signal processing, known for MIMO precoding and hybrid beamforming for millimeter wave 5G.

Robert Wendell Heath Jr.

Robert Wendell Heath Jr. is an American wireless communications engineer at UC San Diego, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025 for MIMO and 5G research.

Roberto Padovani

Roberto Padovani is an Italian-born communications engineer who led CDMA development at Qualcomm, serving as chief technology officer from 2002 to 2011 and creating the HDR technology behind 3G data.

Rui Zhang

Rui Zhang (Zhang Rui) is a Singapore-based wireless communications researcher and Provost's Chair Professor at the National University of Singapore, known for wireless power transfer.

Sidney Metzger

Sidney Metzger (1917–2011) was an American communications engineer elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1976, who worked on secure wartime radio, early satellites, and INTELSAT at COMSAT.

Thomas Haug

Thomas Bryn Haug (1927–2023) was a Norwegian-born Swedish electrical engineer who chaired the committees behind the NMT and GSM mobile standards, winning the 2013 Draper Prize.

Thomas Louis Marzetta

Thomas Louis Marzetta is an American electrical engineer, director of NYU WIRELESS, best known as the originator of massive MIMO, for which he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2020.

Valdemar Poulsen

Valdemar Poulsen (1869–1942) was a Danish engineer who invented the telegraphone, the first magnetic sound recorder, in 1898 and the Poulsen arc radio transmitter in 1902.

Venugopal Veeravalli

Venugopal V. Veeravalli is an American electrical engineer and the Henry Magnuski Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working on statistical inference, machine learning, and wireless communications.