The IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc) is pleased to announce that Professor Ayfer Özgür of Stanford University has been named the inaugural Goldsmith Lecturer in 2020. The ITSoc recently endowed the Goldsmith Lecturer Program with a generous gift by Dr. Andrea Goldsmith. The award provides travel support for an outstanding early-career woman researcher to deliver a lecture at one of the ITSoc’s Schools of Information Theory, held for the benefit of students and postdoctoral researchers. By highlighting technical achievements of early career women, the ITSoc Goldsmith Lecturer Program helps the award recipients build their professional career and recognition. The Lectureship contributes to the public visibility of the researcher and helps increase the diversity of IEEE ITSoc and IEEE as a whole, as women are an under-represented group in both. The award recipient will also serve as a role model and inspiration to diverse students attending the Information Theory Schools.

Professor Ayfer Özgür has made significant contributions to wireless networking. Her early work presented hierarchical virtual-MIMO relaying methods to attain optimal capacity scaling in wireless ad-hoc networks. Her more recent work included a now widely used online method of power control in emerging energy harvesting applications, the solution of a long-standing open problem on the capacity of the relay channel as well as results on distributed learning under communication constraints. Professor Özgür will deliver her lecture at the European School of Information Theory, May 25-29, 2020, held in Stuttgart, Germany.

The IEEE Information Theory Society gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the corporate sponsors to the Goldsmith Lecturer Program: Gold Sponsors Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm; Silver Sponsors Assia, Interdigital; and Bronze Sponsors Google, Keysight, Microsoft, Texas Instruments.

https://www.itsoc.org/honors/goldsmith-lecture