Summary

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at The University of Kansas. I am also with the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center (ITTC) here at KU.

My research expertise is digital communications, with emphasis on theoretical and practical (applied) research problems. The classic reality in communications is that we have a number quantities that we are simultaneously trying to conserve, such as power, bandwidth, and implementation complexity. Efforts to conserve one quantity often come at the expense of another. For example, we can use forward error correction (FEC) codes to conserve power, but at the expense of receiver complexity and (almost always) bandwidth. Therefore, communications engineering often becomes a balancing act in a multi-dimensional tradeoff space. What makes this situation all the more interesting is that steadily-advancing phenomena such as “Moore's Law” are continuously shifting the balance between these tradeoffs. For example, the growing scarcity of spectrum and/or the increasing availability of computational horsepower motivate us to explore technologies that were once impractical or not attractive.

Within this context, I have an active research program with the aim of providing theoretical improvements and practical refinements that advance the state-of-the-art. On the theoretical side, we research advanced modulation and coding techniques, receiver synchronization (frequency, phase, and symbol timing estimation), and wireless communications problems such as noncoherent and differentially coherent detection, communication over fading channels, diversity reception, multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) architectures, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), adaptive equalizers, and turbo equalizers. Primary components of this research are performance analysis and maximum likelihood techniques. On the practical side, we research problems in reduced-complexity-yet-near-optimal receiver design and efficient implementation architectures for discrete-time communications. These problems lie at the intersection of wireless communications and digital hardware design. If you would like to work with me, please follow the research link above.

I teach both graduate and undergraduate courses, on topics that include signals & systems, probability theory, digital communication theory, wireless communications, and advanced modulation & coding. My current and past classes are listed in the link above.

I enjoy interacting with government and industry through sponsored research activities and also on a consulting basis. Please contact me for more information. I am a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of the IEEE Communications Society and the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. I am currently serving as an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications. I am also an active participant in the Communication Theory Technical Committee within the IEEE Communications Society.

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