By David Murphy
KAUST Professor of Electrical Engineering Ahmed Eltawil has recently been honored as the winner of the 8th Annual SSoE Spring Faculty Awards "Innovator of the Year" by the Henry Samueli School of Engineering, University of California, Irvine (UCI). The award is presented annually to the most innovative, current or former, UCI faculty member who has “demonstrated excellence by developing a breakthrough technology, idea or process and has demonstrated its large potential to create economic value and improve lives.”
“I am honored to join the ranks of such prominent awardees as Diran Apelian (NAE member, 2021), Andrei Shkel (IEEE Fellow, 2020) and Kyriacos Athanasiou (National Academy of Medicine Member, 2019),” Eltawil said.
Eltawil joined KAUST in August 2019 from UCI, where he had spent the previous 15 years working in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He was also the founder and director of the university’s Wireless Systems and Circuits Laboratory.
The UCI award recognizes Eltawil and his KAUST Communication and Computing Systems Lab (CCSL) colleagues’ continuing work creating a fully digital, practical and easily deployable full-duplex communication system. By using the same time and frequency resources, the system enables transceivers to send and receive information simultaneously, effectively doubling existing wireless system capacity.
Eltawil’s current research focuses on efficient computing and communications systems, wireless systems, sensor networks, cyber-physical systems and critical infrastructure networks. As an expert in system integration for wireless systems, he acts as an advisor in developing systems for many leading international companies. Lextrum, the company he created in 2015, was acquired in early 2018.
“Through continued collaboration with my group, the acquiring company had a successful initial public offering on NASDAQ this January, which has led to the deployment of the technology in various infrastructure projects,” he concluded.
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