ECE Professor Elevated to IEEE Fellow
Professor Marwan Krunz has been named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the highest grade of membership possible in the IEEE, for his contributions to resource management policies in wireless networks.
Fellowship of the IEEE is an honor conferred by the institute’s board of directors upon members with a record of exceptional accomplishment. The number of fellows selected during any given year cannot exceed one-tenth of one percent of the IEEE’s total voting membership.
Krunz is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and holds a joint appointment of the same rank in the Department of Computer Science. He is the UA site director of Connection One, a joint research center between the UA, industry and the state that focuses on radio frequency and wireless communication systems and networks. Connection One was established under the National Science Foundation’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers, or I/UCRC, program.
Commenting on the class of 2010 IEEE fellows, IEEE President-Elect Moshe Kam stated on the institute’s Web site that he was “awed by the achievements of these intellectuals.” He said that fellows represent the best in IEEE: “In the depth of their analytical abilities, the breadth of their interests, their originality, creativity and mathematical rigor.”
Engineer as Societal Hero
Kam also made a few comments about IEEE fellows in terms of how we view fame and notoriety in modern society. “The new fellows may not be as famous as some Hollywood starlets or the minor so-called celebrities whose trivial affairs end up on the covers of the Sun or the National Enquirer,” Kam said. “However, what they have done for the public, for higher learning and for the advancement of engineering and science, makes them true heroes of our organization and our society.”
Reacting to the news of his fellowship, Krunz said: “It is quite gratifying to see your hard work being recognized by your professional community.” During his 13 years at the UA, Krunz has published with many of his graduate students, whom he gives a lot of credit for his achievements. “Without their dedication and hard work, I would not be in a position to qualify for the IEEE fellowship,” he said. Besides the personal satisfaction, Krunz believes IEEE fellowships improve a department’s stature and ranking nationwide. “Many departments strategically exploit the honors and awards received by their faculty, staff and students as a recruiting tool,” said Krunz.
Krunz received his doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Michigan State University in 1995. He joined UA in 1997 after a brief postdoctoral stint at the University of Maryland, College Park. He chaired the computer engineering group of the ECE department from 2006 to 2008.
He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award (1998). He served on the editorial board for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (2001-2008), and currently serves on the editorial boards for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and the Computer Communications Journal. He has served as a technical program committee chair for several premier conferences in the area of computer networking and wireless communications, including the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, or INFOCOM, and the IEEE Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, aka SECON.
His research is in communications technology and networking, with particular emphasis on resource allocation, adaptive control, and distributed protocol design. His recent research includes cognitive and software-designed radio; distributed resource management in wireless networks; protocol design for mobile ad hoc networks; and systems using multiple input, multiple output and smart antennas. He has published more than 160 journal articles and refereed conference papers on these topics, and holds three U.S. patents.