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Drs. Ian Wong and Aditya Chopra, former WNCG students, co-authored Open RAN: The Definitive Guide, published by Wiley-IEEE Press. Wong was advised by Dr. Brian Evans and graduated with his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2007. He is the Director of RF and Wireless Architecture at the Austin, Texas campus of VIAVI Solutions, a WNCG industrial affiliate. Chopra, also advised by Evans and a 2011 ECE Ph.D. graduate, is a Senior Communication Systems Engineer at Amazon Project Kuiper in Austin, Texas. Amazon joined the WNCG Industrial Affiliate Program in 2023.

Every Spring, Texas ECE’s Awards Banquet celebrates the achievements of the department’s outstanding students and faculty. Three WNCG members were among those honored at this year’s event, which was held last week on May 6. WNCG Student Ahmed Kord won the prestigious Graduate Student Excellence Award for 2018-2019. The department confers this prize annually on one graduate student who has demonstrated “high academic achievement in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.”

WNCG faculty member Constantine Caramanis was one of five associate professors in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) promoted to full professor this spring. Caramanis joined UT ECE and WNCG in the fall of 2006; he is currently the WNCG’s assistant director. His research interests include: Decision-making under uncertainty, Statistical learning and data driven decision-making, Large scale networks and computation, and Adaptive Control and Optimization.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) recently awarded four UT Austin faculty $1 million for a study regarding effects and reparation efforts following WMD attacks on interdependent networks.