Alumnus Hamid Jafarkhani named 'Chancellor's Professor' at UC Irvine

• Jafarkhani

Alumnus Hamid Jafarkhani (1997 EE Ph.D.) was recently honored with the title “Chancellor’s Professor” by the University of California, Irvine. The title is reserved for faculty members who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and whose continued promise for scholarly achievement is unusually high. At any given time, Chancellor’s Professors compose a maximum of 3 percent of the faculty of the university.

Jafarkhani has been on the faculty of UC Irvine’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since 2001. He is the deputy director of the Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing. At Maryland, he was advised by University of Maryland Provost Nariman Farvardin (ECE/ISR).

Jafarkhani's research interests are in communication theory with emphases on coding, wireless communications, and wireless networks. He and his colleagues invented "space-time block coding," a MIMO technology, that has become an active area of research and is widely used in practice. Currently, he is working on the challenges of designing communication systems and networks that use multiple antennas especially in the presence of interference. Also, he is looking at optimizing resources across different layers of a wireless network. This is in particular important for mobile ad-hoc networks and wireless sensor networks where the traditional layer hierarchies may not exist.

He was named one of the top 10 most-cited researchers in the field of computer science during 1997-2007 and is the author of the 2005 book, Space-Time Coding: Theory and Practice, published by Cambridge University Press.

Published August 26, 2009