Dr. Andrea Goldsmith, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, has been awarded the 2020 Marconi Prize for her pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of adaptive wireless communications. She is the first woman to win the flagship award of the Marconi Society, a global foundation dedicated to continuing the legacy of Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio.
Goldsmith co‐founded and served as Chief Technical Officer and Board Member of Plume WiFi and of Quantenna Communications, and she currently serves on the Board of Directors for Medtronic and Crown Castle). She has also been affiliated with the technical advisory boards of Quantenna, Sequans, Interdigital, and Cohere. Goldsmith has launched and led several multi‐university research projects including DARPA’s ITMANET program, and she is currently the lead Stanford Principal Investigator in the NSF Center on the Science of Information. In addition, she has held industry positions at Maxim Technologies, Memorylink Corporation, and AT&T Bell Laboratories.
Goldsmith is donating her $100,000 award to the Marconi Society to start an endowment to fund technology and diversity initiatives.
“I am so deeply honored and humbled to become a Marconi Fellow,” said Goldsmith, who is the Stephen Harris Professor in the School of Engineering. “The honor is particularly meaningful to me at this moment in time, when our information and communications technologies are enabling our universities, companies and the entire social ecosystem to function in a suddenly all-online world, as well as calling attention to the critical importance of digital inclusion.”
The award was announced April 30 by Vint Cerf, a former Stanford professor who helped lay the foundations for the internet. Cerf became a Marconi Fellow in 1998 and serves as the organization’s chairman.
“Andrea has enabled billions of consumers around the world to enjoy fast and reliable wireless service, as well as applications such as video streaming and autonomous vehicles that require stable network performance,” Cerf said. He added, “Andrea’s personal work and that of the many engineers whom she has mentored have had a global impact on wireless networking.”
