Faramarz Fekri and Xiaoli Ma have been elected as IEEE Fellows, effective January 1, 2016. They are both professors in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and members of the Center for Signal and Information Processing.

Fekri was elected as IEEE Fellow “for contributions to coding theory and its applications.” His research interests are in the areas of communications and signal processing, in particular source and channel coding, information theory in biology, statistical inference in large data, information processing for wireless and sensor networks, and communication security.

Fekri has been on the ECE faculty since 2000, where he is a member of the telecommunications and digital signal processing (DSP) technical interest groups. Fekri currently serves an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological, and Multi-Scale Communications and was the co-chair for the ACM International Conference on Nanoscale Computing and Communication (NanoCom 2015) in Boston, Massachusetts.

Ma was elected as IEEE Fellow “for contributions to block transmissions over wireless fading channels.” Her research interests are in the areas of signal processing for communications and networks, signal estimation algorithms, coding theory, wireless communication theory, and sensor and ad hoc networks.

Ma joined the ECE faculty in 2006 after working for three years at Auburn University. She is a member of the DSP technical interest group, and she has been co-director for the Georgia Tech Center of Excellence in Ultra Wideband Technologies. Ma is a senior area editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters and Elsevier Digital Signal Processing and has been an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and Signal Processing Letters. She served as publication chair for the IEEE Global Communications Conference 2013, local arrangements chair for IEEE GlobeSIP 2014, and general chair for the ACM International Conference on Underwater Networks and Systems 2015.  

With the addition of Fekri and Ma, Georgia Tech ECE now has 42 IEEE Fellows among its full-time faculty. Two additional faculty members–Calton Pu and the late Karsten Schwan–from Tech’s College of Computing were also elected to the 2016 class of IEEE Fellows.