Ted Rappaport, NYU WIRELESS
David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Theodore (Ted) S. Rappaport (tsr@nyu.edu) is the David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University (NYU), and is a professor in the NYU Courant Computer Science Dept. and the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He founded the NYU WIRELESS research center in 2012 and the wireless research centers at the University of Texas Austin (WNCG) and Virginia Tech (MPRG) earlier in his career.
He has authored or co-authored widely used textbooks on wireless communications, millimeter wave communications, smart antennas, and simulation. He has provided fundamental knowledge for wireless system design and radio propagation channels used to create the IEEE 802.11Wi-Fi standard, the first U.S. digital TDMA and CDMA standards, the first public Wi-Fi hotspots, and has led the world to adopt millimeter wave and sub-Terahertz frequencies for 5G, 6G, and beyond.
His work influenced the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to open up the world’s first mobile telephone spectrum in the millimeter wave bands in 2014-2016 as part of the FCC Spectrum Frontiers ruling, and he again led the FCC to open up spectrum in the sub-Terahertz bands above 95 GHz with the FCC Spectrum Horizons ruling in 2018-2019.
He founded two businesses that were sold to publicly traded companies — TSR Technologies, Inc. which pioneered software defined radios for cellphone/paging over-the-air intercept and the first Emergency-911 (E911) cellphone position location system, and Wireless Valley Communications, Inc., a leader in site-specific wireless deployment, and was an advisor to Straight Path Communications which sold 5G millimeter wave spectrum to Verizon.
He is a licensed Professional Engineer and is in the Wireless Hall of Fame, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, recipient of IEEE’s Eric Sumner Award, and a life member of the American Radio Relay League. His ham radio call sign is N9NB.