Andrea J. Goldsmith

2024
IEEE JAMES H. MULLIGAN, JR. EDUCATION MEDAL

Sponsored by the IEEE Life Members Fund and MathWorks

For educating, mentoring, and inspiring generations of students, and for authoring pioneering textbooks in advanced digital communications

Andrea Goldsmith is a stellar example of how education and research complement each other. Her contributions to education include her supervision and mentoring of graduate students and postdocs, her three textbooks on wireless communication, her award-winning tutorial papers, and her teaching and mentoring of undergraduate students. Goldsmith has supervised 26 Ph.D. students and 20 postdocs who have gone on to highly successful careers in academia and industry, and who have won major awards and honors, including four who have been elevated to IEEE Fellow status. She founded Stanford Electrical Engineering’s (Stanford EE) student committee to improve the overall experience of students outside the classroom, as well as the IEEE Information Theory Society Student Committee, which created impactful programs for student members and served as a model for other IEEE societies. Her mentoring efforts earned her the IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award and ComSoc’s Women in Communications Engineering (WICE) Mentoring Award. She also chaired the Rising Stars workshop at Stanford, a boot camp to help female graduate students and postdocs obtain and be successful in academic careers. Goldsmith is well known for her classic textbook, Wireless Communication, which has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Russian. She co-authored two other textbooks on wireless communications, MIMO Wireless Communications and Principles of Cognitive Radio, the former of which has also been translated into multiple languages. She is also a co-author on several highly cited tutorials, one of which won the ComSoc Best Tutorial Paper award. While at Stanford, Goldsmith developed an introductory freshman electrical engineering seminar on engineering design to encourage diverse students to consider it as a major. The class is one of the most popular at Stanford and is particularly attractive to women and first-generation students. She also advised and mentored generations of EE undergraduates. 

An IEEE Fellow, Goldsmith is Dean of Engineering and Applied Science and the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.

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