ECE Announces Recipients of 2026 Distinguished Alumni Awards

Photos of four recipients. Dr. Cardenas is wearing blue button down shirt. Dr. Paul is wearing white and light blue dress shirt and navy blazer. Dr. Tyagi is wearing buttoned up black shirt. Dr. Wang is wearing pale blue wide collar shirt, black jacket

The University of Maryland Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has announced the recipients of this year’s Distinguished Alumni Awards. This year’s alums have a variety of exceptional backgrounds across multiple disciplines. They were nominated by ECE faculty members in recognition of their significant accomplishments.

The awards will be presented on November 13th at an event honoring this year’s Distinguished Alumni.

This year’s awardees are:

Alvaro A. Cardenas (M.S. ’02 / Ph.D. ’06)

Dr. Alvaro A. Cardenas is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After receiving his B.S. from Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia, he received his M.S. and Ph.D. for the University of Maryland in ’02 and ’06 respectively. He was nominated by his former advisor, Dr. John Baras.

Cardenas helped establish the foundations of cyber-physical systems security by bringing control theory into the study of cyberattacks, their physical consequences, and the defenses needed to preserve safe operation. His work connected previously separate research communities and developed approaches to detecting attacks through physical-process models and responding before they cause damage.

The enduring influence of this research extends internationally and has received more than 13,000 citations. His work was recognized with the 2026 ACM AsiaCCS Test-of-Time Award, and the NSF CAREER award. Prior to joining UC Santa Cruz, Cardenas was an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, where he received a 2018 Faculty Excellence in Research Award from the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and the Eugene McDermott Fellow Endowed Chair.

Currently, he is serving as the vice chair (and chair-elect) of the IEEE Security and Privacy Technical Committee and is a member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. In 2024, he was Program Chair for the NSF Secure and Trustworthy Computing (SaTC) program PI meeting. He was General Chair of IEEE Security and Privacy. He is a past recipient of a Distinguished Service Award from the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy.

Sanjoy Paul (Ph.D. ’92)

Dr. Sanjoy Paul is a distinguished technology leader, innovator, entrepreneur, and educator whose career has made significant contributions across artificial intelligence, networking, healthcare, cybersecurity, and emerging technologies. He is nominated for this Distinguished Alumnus Award by Professor Sennur Ulukus, Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland.

Dr. Paul earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 1992 under the guidance of the late Professor Raymond Miller, following his B.Tech. from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from the Wharton School. His research and innovation have resulted in 98 granted U.S. patents and numerous international patents spanning AI, computer vision, networking, IoT, security, and intelligent systems.

Over a distinguished corporate career at Bell Labs, AT&T, Infosys, Wipro, and Accenture—where he served as Managing Director and Global Head of Systems & Platforms R&D—Dr. Paul pioneered technologies in Generative AI, robotics, 5G, IoT, and digital twins that have transformed global industries and generated substantial economic value.

His impact extends to healthcare, including development of a scalable AI-based rheumatic heart disease screening system in collaboration with the Cardiological Society of India, with potential for global deployment.

Today, Dr. Paul serves as Associate Vice President–Technology Incubation & Commercialization and Executive Director of Rice Nexus at Rice University, where he helps translate research into ventures and mentors the next generation of entrepreneurs. He is also a co-founder of Houston AI and Orbital-Shield.

A Fellow of IEEE, National Academy of Inventors, and International Academy of Artificial Intelligence Sciences, Dr. Paul has received numerous honors, including the IIT Kharagpur Distinguished Alumnus Award, Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award, and IEEE William R. Bennett Paper Award.

Himanshu Tyagi (Ph.D. ’13)

Himanshu Tyagi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, India and a cofounder of Arborum Labs, a company building world models for power and other critical networks. Prior to this, he cofounded Sentient Labs, an open-source AGI company working on community governance of AI.

He received a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Technology, Communications and Information Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a Ph.D. in 2013. Tyagi was nominated by his advisor Dr. Prakash Narayan. At UMD, Tyagi received a 2012 Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship and was a Future Faculty Program Fellow of the Clark School of Engineering in 2010. After completing postdoc research at the Information Theory and Applications Center at the University of California San Diego, he joined the Indian Institute of Science in 2015.

Tyagi’s research interests include information theory as applied to problems in cryptography, statistics and AI. He is also interested in building large techno-social systems including distributed cellular networks, blockchains, and community governed AI. For the last three years, he has been building reasoning AI systems for retrieval, decision making, and lately scientific discovery.

In 2020, he was awarded the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) Young Scientist Medal (2020). He was inducted into the 2024 Class of the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering Early Career Distinguished Alumni Society.

He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and as Area Editor for Foundations and Trends in Communication and Information Theory. He co-authored a book on Information Theoretic Cryptography, available through Cambridge University Press. During the COVID era, he was a scientific advisor for the Bangalore COVID war room, where he led the development of software used to track COVID cases and deciding testing strategy for the six million residents of Bangalore and its surrounding area.

Beibei Wang (M.S. ’08 / Ph.D. ’09)

Beibei Wang is Vice President of Research at ADT Research, formerly Origin AI, which was acquired by ADT in February 2026. She was nominated by her former advisor, Professor Ray Liu.

Wang received a B.S. in electrical engineering with highest honors from the University of Science and Technology of China. She joined UMD with a Distinguished Graduate Fellowship, earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in 2008 and 2009, and received a Dean’s Doctoral Research Award for her dissertation. After a year as a postdoctoral research associate at UMD, she joined Qualcomm Corporate R&D, then joined Origin AI in 2015, where she leads a research team that turns ubiquitous Wi-Fi infrastructure into commercial sensing platforms.

Her patented technologies are embedded in millions of devices, from routers to smart light bulbs, and power products that have won CES Innovation Awards. Her work includes Wi-Fi sensing to detect falls among the elderly, child-presence detection for child safety, and motion sensing for home security. She has authored 130+ papers and holds 160+ patents and patent applications, and she co-authored two Cambridge University Press books, including Wireless AI.

Wang is an IEEE Fellow. Her honors include the 2025 IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement Award, the 2025 IEEE ComSoc Fred W. Ellersick Prize, and UMD’s Invention of the Year Award (2012). She serves as Senior Editor of the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Sensors and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. She is an IEEE Sensors Council Distinguished Lecturer and an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Industry Speaker, and previously served as an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer.

Published November 12, 2026