Alumna Jing Yang wins two IEEE Communications Society awards

Alumna Jing Yang (EE Ph.D. 2010) was recently honored with two IEEE Communications Society awards for her research: the 2020 Networking Networking Women (N2Women) Stars in Computer Networking and Communications award, and the Women in Communications Engineering (WICE) Early Achievement Award. The Pennsylvania State University Electrical and Computer Engineering assistant professor was advised by Professor Sennur Ulukus (ECE/ISR) as a graduate student.

Yang’s research interests are in energy harvesting communications, the age of information and machine learning for wireless networking systems. Her work involves understanding the fundamental limits of wireless networking systems, as well as designing efficient scheduling, resource allocation and learning algorithms for system performance optimization.

“I appreciate the recognition from the community for what I have done in the past,” Yang said. “In the future, I will keep pursuing what I think is interesting in this area and hopefully push the boundary forward.”

N2Women, part of the IEEE Communications Society, is a discipline-specific community of researchers in the fields of networking and communications. It encourages diversity and aims at fostering connections among under-represented women in the computing sub-field. N2Women’s Stars in Computer Networking and Communications award honors 10 women each year. Selection criteria include scientific profile and contributions, experience, diversity aspects and recommendations.

WICE, a standing committee within the IEEE Communications Society, promotes the visibility and roles of women communications engineers and provides a venue for their professional growth. WICE grants the Early Achievement Award to its members who “have done outstanding technical work in the broad field of communications engineering and have achieved early career visibility in the field through research and service.”

Yang has been on the Penn State faculty since 2016. Before that time, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas. While there, she received a 2015 NSF CAREER Award for “When Energy Harvesting Meets 'Big Data': Designing Smart Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks.”

Read the full story about Yang’s two new awards at the Penn State news website.

—We are grateful to Sarah Small at Penn State for the original version of this story.

Published January 26, 2021