Andrea Goldsmith
Biography
Andrea Goldsmith, an IEEE Fellow, received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley and is the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science and the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University. Previously, she was the Stephen Harris Professor of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where she is now Harris Professor Emerita and on the faculty of Electrical Engineering at Caltech. She is the 2020 Marconi Fellow in recognition of her work in wireless communication, a Fellow of Stanford University, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Academy of Engineering. Goldsmith is the recipient of many awards including the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award, 2019; the IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award, 2021; and the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal, 2024.
One of the most prolific researchers in communications and information theory, Andrea Goldsmith has profoundly impacted the design principles of modern wireless communications systems. She determined the Shannon capacity of time-varying wireless channels, which she later extended to find the capacity and capacity regions of time-varying multiple-antenna (MIMO) channels, multiuser channels, and cellular systems. In addition, Goldsmith pioneered practical adaptive modulation and MIMO techniques based on her capacity results that achieve close to these fundamental bounds. These results helped shape the adaptive modulation, MIMO, and multiuser MIMO techniques in current cellular and Wi-Fi standards. Her capacity analysis of ad-hoc and cognitive radio networks led to novel strategies for mitigating or exploiting interference between users. Goldsmith founded two companies to commercialize her ideas, whose products have been adopted by major service providers worldwide. Goldsmith co-founded and served as CTO of Plume (formerly Accelera, Inc.) and of Quantenna Communications, Inc. and held industry positions at Maxim Technologies, Memorylink Corporation, and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Her research interests are in information theory, communication theory, and signal processing, and their application to wireless communications, interconnected systems, and neuroscience.
