Nikil Jayant is among the 175 renowned academic inventors named to the 2020 class of Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). 

Jayant is a professor emeritus in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). During his career at Georgia Tech from 1998-2013, he held the John Pippin Chair in ECE and was a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. He was also the executive director for the Georgia Center for Advanced Telecommunications Technologies and the Georgia Tech Broadband Institute. 

Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional accolade bestowed to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. Jayant is the inventor or co-inventor of 36 patents at Bell Laboratories and at Georgia Tech, including several that are incorporated in international standards or proprietary technologies for multimedia communications. His inventions have enabled today's digital communications practice in an end-to-end fashion. They teach fundamental aspects of audiovisual signal processing, such as compression, networking, and enhancement of speech, image, audio, and video information. 

The 2020 class of NAI Fellows will be inducted at the Tenth Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Inventors on June 8, 2021 in Tampa, Florida. To learn more about the 2020 class of NAI Fellows, visit the NAI website.