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Giannakis appointed director of University's Digital Technology Center

Georgios Giannakis, a professor in the University of Minnesota's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been appointed as the new director of the University's Digital Technology Center (DTC). The appointment is effective July 1, 2008. The DTC director position also includes a concurrent appointment to the ADC Director's Chair. Giannakis replaces current DTC director Andrew Odlyzko who is returning to full-time faculty duties in the School of Mathematics.

As director of the DTC, Giannakis will be responsible for the vision and direction of the center's mission to serve as a hub of innovation and excellence at the University of Minnesota in the digital technologies serving the industrial, educational, and public needs of the state and nation. With his outstanding record and reputation in the area of wireless communications, signal processing and networking, Giannakis hopes to raise the visibility of the DTC by securing significant sponsored research funding in various aspects of digital technology.

Giannakis has served as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota since 1999. He also currently holds the ADC Chair in Wireless Telecommunications. His general interests span the areas of communications, networking and statistical signal processingsubjects on which he has published more than 275 journal papers, 450 conference papers, two edited books and two research monographs. His current research focuses on complex-field and network coding, multicarrier, cooperative wireless communications, cognitive radios, cross-layer designs, mobile ad hoc networks, and wireless sensor networks.

Giannakis is the recipient or co-recipient of six paper awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing and Communications Societies, including the G. Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications. He received technical achievement awards from the Signal Processing Society in 2000 and from the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) in 2005. Giannakis also received a Young Faculty Teaching Award and the George W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Research from the University of Minnesota. A fellow of the EURASIP and the IEEE, he has served the IEEE in a number of posts, and is currently a distinguished lecturer for the IEEE-Signal Processing Society.

Giannakis received an electrical engineering degree from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1981. From 1982 to 1987, he worked as a teaching assistant and researcher at the University of Southern California (USC), where he received his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1983, a master's degree in mathematics in 1986, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1986. From 1987 to 1999, Giannakis served as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Virginia before coming to the University of Minnesota.