Y. Thomas Hou, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named an Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Fellow for his contributions to modeling and optimization of wireless networks.

The status of Fellow is one of the most prestigious honors of the institute, bestowed upon less than one-tenth of one percent of the annual voting membership of IEEE.

As a co-director of the Complex Networks and Security Research laboratory at Virginia Tech, Hou leads research on wireless networking. He is recognized internationally for developing innovative solutions to complex cross-layer optimization problems in wireless networks.  

Among his other accomplishments, Hou was a recipient of a 2003 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and a 2004 National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He received five best paper awards from IEEE and one Distinguished Paper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He holds five U.S patents. 

As of November 2013, his work has been cited more than 7,400 times per Google Scholar and his h-index is 42.

Hou has held several leadership positions in the IEEE Communications Society. He currently serves as the steering committee chair of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), which Google Scholar ranks as the top conference venue in computer networks and wireless communications. 

Hou also serves as an area editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, overseeing a team of 10 editors in the wireless networks area, an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, as well as editor of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (Cognitive Radio Series) and IEEE Wireless Communications. He was a past editor of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

Hou co-edited a graduate textbook, Cognitive Radio Communications and Networks: Principles and Practices (Academic Press/Elsevier, 2010), listed as a best reading on cognitive radio by the IEEE Communications Society. He has authored another graduate textbook, Applied Optimization Methods for Wireless Networks, to be published by Cambridge University Press in Spring 2014.

Hou joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 2002. He received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York, a master's degree from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Polytechnic Institute of New York University. From 1997 to 2002, he was a researcher at Fujitsu Laboratories of America in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Written by Eileen Baumann

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