Prof. Suresh Subramaniam, the department chair, has received the 2017 Distinguished Researcher Award from the the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the George Washington University. The award recognizes his significant research accomplishments, and was presented to him at a ceremony on May 4, 2017.
Prof. Subramaniam is an internationally-recognized researcher and scholar in optical networking. He has made numerous high-impact and pioneering contributions to optical network architectures, algorithms, and performance modeling. He joined GW in 1997 after obtaining his PhD degree from the University of Washington in Electrical Engineering, and has had two sabbatical stints, one each at the University of Maryland and at MIT. He has published around 175 peer-reviewed papers in top venues, and has received two best paper awards and a best paper award nomination, besides co-editing 3 books on optical networking. His papers have had significant impact as evidenced by the number of times they have been cited (around 4800 times, with his top 5 pieces of work garnering almost 2000 citations). His research has been sponsored by NSF, DARPA, NIST, and NSA. Prof. Subramaniam is also active in professional service,and has frequently been invited to serve in leading roles in conferences and journals. He has served on the editorial boards of seven journals including for a full 6-year term on the board of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and on the board of the IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking. He has chaired several conferences including three leading IEEE conferences in his field, namely, INFOCOM, ICC, and Globecom. He served a two-year term as elected Chair of the IEEE ComSoc Optical Networking Technical Committee in 2012 and 2013. For his research contributions to optical networking, he was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow in 2015.