Srikant: Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Professorship: Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Endowed Professor of
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Thanks to a generous gift from Fred Nearing (BSEE '43) and his wife, Betty, the ECE Department will use the Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Professorship to recruit and retain quality faculty.

After graduating in 1943, Nearing worked for Western Electric writing technical data on radar systems including the radar bombing system in B-29 aircraft. After the war, he worked for a couple companies doing lab design, then found his niche in technical sales. "I'm a practical engineer, not a technical one," Nearing said. Before retiring, Nearing spent most of his sales career with Hewlett-Packard and Electronic Instrument Associates.

Rayadurgam Srikant

Professor R. Srikant’s research interests are in the areas of communication networks, queuing theory, information theory, game theory, and stochastic control. His current focus is on designing distributed algorithms for wireless networks, the Internet, and peer-to-peer networks, and understanding the fundamental limits of performance of such algorithms.

Srikant received his bachelor of technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1985 and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1988 and 1991, respectively, all in electrical engineering. He was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1991 to 1995. He joined the University of Illinois in 1995 as a professor in the Department of General Engineering until 2003, when he joined the ECE Department. He is also a research professor in the Coordinated Science Lab.

He has been recognized for his research achievements with the NSF CAREER Award in 1997 and the Shimemura Young Author Prize from the Asian Control Conference in 2002. In 2006 he was named an IEEE Fellow. He has been a plenary speaker in many international conferences and workshops and was an invited speaker at a discussion meeting of the Royal Society, London in 2006.

He is an associate of the Center for Advanced Study during the 2008-2009 academic year. From 2005 to 2008 he was a Gilmore Family Faculty Scholar at Illinois. He has also been on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent on several occasions during his time at Illinois.

Srikant is active within his field, having served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Automatica and the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He has also served a guest editor for special issues of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. He was a program co-chair of IEEE INFOCOM, 2006.

Srikant holds several patents and is the author of a book titled Mathematics of Internet Congestion Control, and a co-author of the monograph Network Optimization and Control.