The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has elected four Georgia Tech professors 2006 IEEE Fellows - Ye (Geoffrey) Li, Gary May, Steven McLaughlin and Madhavan Swaminathan. Georgia Tech was one of only three schools (including Carnegie Mellon and University of California, San Diego) to have four fellows, and the University of Illinois had the most fellows with seven.

The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the board of directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.

Li, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech, was elected a fellow for his contributions to signal processing for wireless communications. His general research interests include statistical signal processing and wireless mobile systems. In these areas, he has published about 100 papers in refereed journals or conferences and filed over 10 patents. He also has two books, entitled, Blind Equalization and Identification (co-authored with Z. Ding, published by Mercel Dekker Inc. in 2000) and OFDM for Wireless Communications (co-authored with G. Stüber, published by Springer in 2005).

Li served as a guest editor for special issues on Signal Processing for Wireless Communications for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications and an editorial board member of EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, and is currently serving as an editor for Wireless Communication Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He organized and chaired many international conferences, including technical program vice-chair of IEEE 2003 International Conference on Communications.

May, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair for ECE, was elected a fellow for his contributions to semiconductor manufacturing and engineering education. Previously, May was the executive assistant to Georgia Tech President G. Wayne Clough, where he served as the president's chief liaison, and the Motorola Foundation Professor in the School of ECE.

May's research and educational interests are in computer-aided manufacturing of integrated circuits. The author of over 200 technical publications, he has written one textbook, Fundamentals of Semiconductor Fabrications and contributed to portions of 14 additional books. From 1994-2001, he was on the editorial board for the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing, spending the last four years as editor-in-chief.

McLaughlin, the Ken Byers Professor in ECE, was elected a fellow for his contributions to information theory and applications to digital recording technology. From 1999-2003, he was a principal scientist for Calimetrics. Since 2003, he has been the director of research at Georgia Tech Lorraine, the European Campus of Georgia Tech in Metz, France.

McLaughlin is president of the IEEE Information Theory. He has published Information Theory: 50 years of Discovery (Wiley/IEEE Press, 1999) and more than 200 papers in journals and conferences and holds 24 U.S. patents. He received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1997 where President Clinton cited him "for leadership in the development of high-capacity, nonbinary optical recording formats."

Swaminathan, a professor in ECE and the deputy director of the Packaging Research Center at Georgia Tech, was elected a fellow for his contributions in design tools, design methodologies and electromagnetic interference (EMI) control for power delivery in digital and mixed-signal systems. He is the founder of Jacket Micro Devices, a company specializing in integrated devices and modules for wireless applications where he serves as the chief scientist. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was with the Advanced Packaging Laboratory at IBM working on packaging for super computers.

Swaminathan's research interests are in digital, RF, optoelectronics and mixed-signal packaging with emphasis on design, modeling, characterization and testing. He has more than 250 publications in refereed journals and conferences, has co-authored three book chapters, has ten issued patents and has six patents pending. Swaminathan has been a guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging and IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques. He was the associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Components and Packaging Technologies.