Professor Alan E. Willner of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical
Engineering/Electrophysics was selected as one of 60 professors to receive an award as part of the HP 2009 Innovation Research Program, which is designed to create opportunities for colleges, universities and research institutes around the world to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP.
Willner: adds to a long list of distinctions
Willner's Optical Communications Laboratory in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering will continue to collaborate with HP Labs on a research initiative focused on Signal Processing in On-Chip Optical DWDM Networks.
"This is a terrific honor and recognition," said Hsieh Department co-chair Alexander Sawchuk, noting that it was part of a larger pattern of international recognition including the Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science & Engineering, the National Science Foundation National Young Investigator Award, the Fulbright Foundation Senior Scholar Lecturing and Research Fellowship, the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) Lasers & Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) Distinguished Lecturer Award, the IEEE LEOS Distinguished Service Award, the USC Associates Award for University-Wide Excellence in Teaching, the USC/TRW Best Engineering Teacher Award, the USC/Northrop Outstanding Junior Engineering Faculty Research Award, the 2001 Eddy Paper Award from Pennwell Publications for the Best Contributed Technical Article (across all 30 magazines in Pennwell's Advanced Technology Division) and the Armstrong Foundation Memorial Prize for the highest-ranked EE graduate student at Columbia Univ. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Optical Society of America (OSA), and he was a Fellow of the Semiconductor Research Corp.
“Our goal with this program is to collaborate with the brightest minds from around the world to tackle the industry’s most complex problems and push the frontiers of fundamental science,” said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president, Research, HP and director, HP Labs. “The Viterbi School has demonstrated outstanding achievement and a vision that will help inspire technological innovation and address the most complex challenges and opportunities facing the industry in the next decade.”
HP reviewed nearly 300 proposals from more than 140 universities in 29 countries on a range of topics within the eight high-impact research themes at HP Labs – analytics, cloud, content transformation, digital commercial print, immersive interaction, information management, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability. More details about the HP Labs Innovation Research Program and worldwide award recipients are available at http://www.hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/irp/2009_results.html.
More information about Willner's work is is available at http://csi.usc.edu/faculty/willner.html
