Rick Brown, electrical and computer engineering professor and Department Head, has been named the Weston Hadden
Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
This endowed professorship was established by a bequest from the late Weston Hadden, WPI class of 1922, who made the most impactful contributions of his career as an electrical engineer with the New York Telephone Company. The professorship honors Hadden’s memory and his role as an inventor and practitioner in electrical engineering.
Rick Brown received a BS and MS in electrical engineering from the University of Connecticut and received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University. From 1992-1997, he was with General Electric Electrical Distribution and Control. Since August 2000, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering 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.
His research interests are currently in machine learning, wireless communications, synchronization, distributed computing, and game-theoretic analysis of communication networks.
Brown is founder of the signal processing and information networking laboratory (spinlab) at WPI. The lab brings together motivated undergraduate and graduate students to work on fundamental and applied problems in signal processing, communication systems, and networking. The Spinlab is supported by the National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, DARPA, Raytheon BBN Technologies, Bose, and General Electric Industrial Systems. The generous support provided by these sponsors has funded the degrees of several graduate students as well as the senior project work of dozens of undergraduate students.
“It’s fitting that this professorship – named for Weston Hadden, an innovator in the early years of electrical engineering – should be held by Rick Brown, who has a demonstrated record of innovation as a co-inventor on multiple patents,” said John McNeill, the Bernard M. Gordon Dean of Engineering. “Rick’s leadership of the ECE department has been marked by increased visibility and reputation in key research areas such as hardware security, machine learning, and renewable energy systems. Rick has also focused on increasing the diversity of the faculty in ECE, hiring from underrepresented groups and fostering an environment where everyone feels valued and supported. I’m grateful to the Hadden family for their gift to WPI, and our ability to recognize Prof. Rick Brown with this well deserved honor.”