Professor Naofal Al-Dhahir has been named an IEEE fellow, one of the highest honors bestowed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

 

The honor, for “contributions to high data-rate communication over broadband channels,” recognizes Al-Dhahir for a large body of work that includes an important component of the high-speed DSL Internet technology used by millions of people around the world.

A professor of electrical engineering in UT Dallas’ Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, Al-Dhahir is the ninth member of the school’s faculty to be named an IEEE fellow. The designation is granted each year to a select group of the organization’s 370,000 members for accomplishments that “have contributed importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology.”

An authority on baseband processing for broadband communications, Al-Dhahir is best known for his research on equalization algorithms for wire-line and wireless broadband communications. The results of his work have been deployed in a number of commercial applications, including digital televisions, DSL modems and the wireless Internet-access standard WiMAX.

His interactions with students, however, are equally important to him, he noted.

“The most rewarding part of my job as a professor at UTD is daily interaction with students as a teacher in the classroom and as a research supervisor in the lab,” he said. “I get tremendous satisfaction from the feeling that I’m making a positive impact on their lives by teaching them to be creative thinkers and fearless researchers.”

Before joining UTD, Al-Dhahir spent nine years working in industry, first as a senior member of the technical staff at the General Electric Research and Development Center and then as a principal member of the technical staff at AT&T Research. He holds 22 U.S. patents and has co-authored more than 175 journal and conference papers.


IEEE is the world’s leading professional organization and standards-setting authority for a wide range of high-tech fields, including electrical engineering, aerospace systems, computer engineering, telecommunications, biomedical engineering



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Naofal Al-Dhahir

Naofal Al-Dhahir’s work includes a component of the DSL Internet technology used by millions of people around the world.