Theodore “Ted” Rappaport is a pioneer in the technical fields of wireless communication, radio, antennas, and software. His numerous contributions extend to radio propagation measurements, statistical and site-specific channel modeling, millimeter wave and THz wireless communications with beamforming, communications system design, upper mid-band FR3 channel modeling, energy-efficiency metrics, and physical layer simulation.

In 1987, Ted’s Ph.D. at Purdue University provided the basis to create the first Wi-Fi standard, and his work led to the first US digital cellphone standards, TDMA and CDMA. Ted and his students engineered the world’s first public Wi-Fi hotspots, and his work proved the viability of millimeter waves for mobile communications. The global wireless industry adopted Ted’s vision for 5G networks. He has produced over 20 textbooks on the topics of wireless communications, adaptive antennas, simulation, and millimeter wave communications which are used in hundreds of universities across the world and are translated in eight languages.

Ted founded two businesses that were sold to publicly traded companies – TSR Technologies, Inc. which pioneered software defined radios for cellphone/paging over-the-air intercept and the first Emergency-911 (E911) cell phone position location system, and Wireless Valley Communications, Inc., a leader in site-specific wireless deployment that ushered in the Wi-Fi and microcell/indoor cellular revolutions. He was technical advisor to Straight Path Communications, a millimeter wave spectrum company that was sold to Verizon in 2017. He has advised many global wireless companies, has more than 100 patents, and has served on Technological Advisory Council of the FCC, the Radio Club of America, the Marconi Society, and is a frequent advisor to the Wireless History Foundation.

Currently at New York University, Ted is the David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor of Electrical Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and is in the Courant Computer Science Department of NYU, and the NYU Langone School of Radiology Medicine. He is the founder and director of NYU WIRELESS. Earlier in his career Ted founded major wireless academic research centers at Virginia Tech and The University of Texas at Austin.

Among his many accolades, Ted was inducted into the Wireless Hall of Fame in 2019 and IEEE Vehicular Technology Society in 2024.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Radio Club of America, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of IEEE’s Eric Sumner Award, and a life member of the American Radio Relay League.

As a survivor of Acute Myeloid Leukemia and a stem cell transplant recipient in 2015, Ted worked with his doctors on a protocol, the knowledge from which is being used globally to improve survivability of patients post-transplant.