Andrea Goldsmith is a giant in the wireless industry and has been a driving force for the advancement of wireless communications since the early 1990s. After receiving her PhD in Electrical Engineering at UC Berkley, Andrea joined the faculty at Caltech. In 1999, she was recruited to Stanford University, where she remains an emeritus faculty member today.
While a professor at Stanford, she pioneered the concepts of adaptive coding and adaptive multi-level modulations found in all of today’s modern wireless communications. Andrea also discovered fundamental results about the duality of multiple-user communication channels and the use of dirty paper coding. This led to a vast understanding and optimization of modulation and coding methods, as well as the study and optimization of MIMO methods that are used in today’s 4G and 5G cellphone and Wi-Fi technologies, thus helping to improve cellular and Wi-Fi services to billions of people daily.
As a top technical expert in the wireless field, Andrea is part of President Biden’s Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST), where she has helped the U.S. position the wireless and chip industries for the future.
In 2020, Andrea was named Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. At Princeton, she oversees the entire engineering faculty and has launched a university research center in wireless communications called Wireless-NextG. She has authored three globally adopted textbooks and is a serial entrepreneur who founded the companies Quantenna and Plume Wi-Fi (formerly Accelera). Both companies played a major role in the offload of cellphone traffic to Wi-Fi.
Andrea is an IEEE Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering (U.K.), holds 38 U.S. patents, and has received numerous international medals, awards, and recognitions. She serves on the Boards of Directors of Intel, Crown Castle, and Medtronic. Andrea was awarded the Marconi Prize in 2020 – the first woman ever to receive this prestigious award. For her work on adaptive beamforming for multi-antenna Wi-Fi, Andrea was elected into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2024.
Inducted into the Wireless Hall of Fame in 2024.