ECE Department Head

On behalf of the ECE Department Head Search Committee, it gives me great pleasure to announce that Professor Rick Brown has accepted WPI’s offer to be the next Head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at WPI. 

Professor Brown received his ECE bachelor’s degree from the University of Connecticut in 1992, his MS degree from the University of Connecticut in 1996, and his PhD from Cornell University 2000. He joined WPI as an Assistant Professor in 2000. In addition to his faculty appointment at WPI, he also held an appointment as a Visiting Associate Professor at Princeton University from August 2007 to June 2008 and an appointment as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation from January 2016 to July 2018. More recently, he served as Associate Department Head from 2018-2019, and has been interim Head of the ECE department since 2019. 

Professor Brown is a highly regarded scholar and educator in the areas of signal processing, wireless communications, synchronization, low-latency networking, and game-theoretic analysis of communication networks. In 2002 he founded the signal processing and information networking laboratory (spinlab) with the purpose of bringing motivated undergraduate and graduate students together to work on fundamental and applied problems in signal processing, communication systems, and networking. Spinlab funding has been provided by government and industry sponsors including  National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, DARPA, Raytheon BBN Technologies, Bose, Inc, and General Electric Industrial Systems.  Professor Brown also has a demonstrated record of innovation, as a co-inventor on multiple patents in the areas of wireless communication and power management.

Professor Brown has been an invited keynote speaker at IEEE Globecom, and since 2018 he has been an elected member of Board of Governors for the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers.  He is Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and has served in organizing and reviewing roles for a wide range of journals and conferences including IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Globecom, ICASSP, CISS, and the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers. 

I would like to thank all the members of the search committee, and we express our gratitude to Professor Brown for his continuing service to WPI. 

John McNeill (search committee chair)
Reinhold Ludwig
Berk Sunar
John Sullivan
Aaron Deskins