Professor Georgios Giannakis to be inducted into the National Academy of Inventors
Giannakis holds 32 patents, several related to 4G LTE standard
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (01/22/2020) — The University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering announced that Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Georgios B. Giannakis has been named a National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow and will be inducted into the NAI at the academy’s annual meeting this spring. Giannakis holds the McKnight Presidential Chair Professorship and is director of the University’s Digital Technology Center.
Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.
Giannakis is a world-renown and field-shaping engineer and scientist who is known best for his contributions to the fundamental understanding of signal processing, wireless communications, networking, and data science. His group’s research program has broad impact to a variety of technologically important fields, including the Internet of Things (IofT) as well as social, brain, and power networks with renewables.
Giannakis holds more than 32 U.S. and foreign patents in the field of wireless communications (several related to the 4G LTE standard), signal processing, and power systems. He has authored or co-authored more than 450 journal publications, more than 750 conference publications, 25 book chapters, two books, and two research monographs. He has 73,000 Google Scholar citations and a research author h-index of 143.
He is the recipient or co-recipient of 10 best journal paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing and Communications societies. He also has received IEEE Technical Achievement Awards, the IEEE Fourier Technical Field Award, and the IEEE Communications Society Education Award. He has led more than 65 sponsored research projects with funding in excess of $17 million.
Giannakis has mentored a group of 50 Ph.D. students and 25 postdoctoral researchers with documented diversity. Thirty of the 50 Ph.D. students are now faculty members, 15 work in industry, and five work in government labs. Twelve of the 50 Ph.D. students and 10 of the 25 postdoctoral researchers have gone on to be named IEEE Fellows. Many of these students and postdocs have also gone on to become inventors in their own right.
Giannakis joined the University of Minnesota faculty in 1999, and has held the ADC Endowed Chair in Wireless Telecommunications since 2001. He has served as director of the University of Minnesota’s Digital Technology Center (DTC) since 2008. Since 2016 he has also held a McKnight Presidential Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The 2019 NAI Fellows will be highlighted with a full-page announcement this month in The Chronicle of Higher Education and in issues of Technology & Innovation. Giannakis will be inducted into NAI at the academy’s annual meeting April 8-10, 2020 at The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Ariz.
For more information and a complete list of 2019 NAI Fellows, visit the NAI website.