By Andrew Harms, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Steven Schultz, Princeton University
Like so many technologies that we now take for granted in our everyday lives, wireless networking represents a fabric of innovations densely woven from the work of many contributors. The IEEE’s annual honors ceremony is an opportunity to recognize the most significant contributions in relevant fields for the benefit of society. This article highlights one of these major contributors, Andrea Goldsmith, the 2025 recipient of the Mildred Dresselhaus Medal. Andrea’s story exemplifies how individual achievement can grow from and, in turn, empower whole communities of researchers.
The short story of this year’s Dresselhaus Medal is that Andrea Goldsmith, as stated in IEEE’s announcement, “has made groundbreaking contributions to advancing the theory and practice of wireless communications over the past three decades.”
However, this does not capture Andrea’s whole impact as both a researcher and a person. The longer story starts with acknowledging that had it not been for one teaching assistant in an undergraduate algebra class at Berkeley, she may not have become an engineer. Andrea had left high school early and entered Berkely’s engineering undergraduate program with less preparation than some of her peers. She considered switching to politics until her first female teaching assistant in that algebra class inspired her to keep going.
A post-college job at a start-up inspired her pursue a Ph.D., which brought her back to Berkeley. There she joined the group of Pravin Varaiya and shortly thereafter attended her first IEEE conference, GLOBECOM 1990. That conference turned out to be transformative because she met Larry Greenstein of Bell Labs who later offered her an internship working with him and Jerry Foschini. Larry and Jerry inspired Andrea with excitement about the then-nascent field of cellular communications.
With that start, Andrea embarked on a career of innovation, entrepreneurship, and leadership. Her first major contribution to the field started as a graduate student when she demonstrated how adaptive modulation could achieve the maximum data rate (Shannon capacity) of time-varying wireless channels. Later, as a faculty member at Caltech and then at Stanford, she did groundbreaking work on establishing theoretical bounds and practical techniques for maximizing the performance of multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems. This work was instrumental in establishing today’s ubiquitous use of adaptive MIMO in cellular and Wi-Fi communications. Her broad body of research has developed theoretical limits and practical algorithms to maximize the performance and reliability of wireless networks across a broad range of applications.
Eager to test her theoretical work in practical use, she started two companies. First, in 2006, she took a leave from Stanford to co-found and serve as chief technology officer of Quantenna Communications, which eventually went public and was acquired by On Semiconductor. In 2010, she co-founded another company, now called Plume, which combines cloud software and adaptive mesh Wi-Fi to optimize in-home wireless performance over a range of conditions and uses. She is an inventor on 38 issued patents. In recognition of her technical achievements, she was awarded the Marconi Prize in 2020.
Through her research and entrepreneurship, Andrea certainly has made the “outstanding technical contributions in science and engineering of great impact to IEEE fields of interest” called for in awarding the Dresselhaus Medal. Importantly, these achievements go hand-in-hand with her leadership, teaching, and mentorship in the research community and higher education more broadly. In her dedication to teaching future generations, she has authored several important textbooks and last year received the IEEE Mulligan Education Medal for her education efforts. At IEEE, she founded and chaired the IEEE Technical Activities Committee on Diversity and Inclusion and the IEEE Board of Directors Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. She left Stanford in 2020 to become dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. There, she grew the faculty by 21% and built several important new programs, including the NextG Initiative to bring companies and researchers together to build future networking technologies. She is now taking her leadership to a public school, Stony Brook University, where she will become president in August.
Along the way, she has served on the boards of Intel, Medtronic, and Crown Castle, as well as on President Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In the latter role, she helped guide recommendations to implement the CHIPS and Science Act. She has also been active in the IEEE throughout her career and considers it her professional home. It has been a great source of mentors and supporters, leadership opportunities, collaborations, and friendships.
So just as a variety of influences (with a strong thread through the IEEE) helped propel Andrea’s prodigious technical accomplishments, her own leadership and mentorship is enabling new generations to impact the fields of interest to IEEE, in particular wireless communications, and society at large. A cloth still being woven. The story of wireless communications cannot be told without Andrea’s contributions, and I look forward to watching her write the rest of her story.
