Category: News

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.

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam recently served on the organizing committee of IEEE Globecom and was a TPC co-chair of the Optical Networks and Systems symposium. Globecom was held December 4-8 in Washington, DC and is one of the flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society. It consists of 13 symposia and attracts approximately 2,500 attendees, including several researchers from industry. On December 8, Prof. Subramaniam also organized the NSF JUNO PI meeting, held in the SEH. The JUNO program is a joint program between Japanese and US researchers on large-scale communication networks. The PI meeting included project presentations from the PIs of the funded projects, as well as a keynote talk titled “Stormy Clouds,” delivered by Prof. Muriel Medard, the Cecil H. Green Professor of EECS at MIT.

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam is the lead PI on a $500,000 NSF collaborative grant awarded to GW and MIT for the project “WDM-based ultra-scale data center networks: architectures and control algorithms.” Conventional data center network architectures use power-hungry electronic switches and struggle to keep up with bandwidth demands as data centers scale in size to hundreds of thousands of servers. This project aims to explore novel alternative architectures for data center networks that are based on several optical switching technologies. The project also involves two key (unfunded) partners, Microsoft—which will share its expertise and data from operating large data centers—and Infinera, a company that designs and manufactures optical components and systems. GW and MIT will each receive $250,000 from the grant.

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam was an invited presenter recently at the IEEE Communications Society's Summer School in Trento, Italy. The summer school is intended for doctoral students from around the world and covers hot topics in communications. Prof. Subramaniam’s lecture covered data center networking.

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam has been elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow (Class of 2015) for his research contributions. The official citation reads: "for contributions to optical network architectures, algorithms, and performance modeling". IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select members who have extraordinary contributions in one of IEEE's fields of interest. More information about the IEEE Fellows program can be found here.

Prof. Subramaniam has been a prolific researcher in networking publishing over 150 articles in prestigious peer-reviewed conferences and journals. His research has been sponsored by several federal agencies including the NSF, DARPA, and NSA.