Steven W. McLaughlin

Steven W. McLaughlin received the B.S.E. E. degree from Northwestern University, the M.S.E. degree from Princeton University, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan. He joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech in September 1996 where is now Vice Provost for International Initiatives and Ken Byers Professor of ECE. As Vice Provost he is responsible for Georgia Tech’s global engagement and is the point person for international initiatives in research, education, and economic development. He is also President of GT Global, Inc. a not-for-profit corporation recently created to manage select Georgia Tech international initiatives. He is also a co-founder of Whisper Communications , a physical-layer security company established in 2009 to commercialize technologies developed in his research group. He was previously Deputy Director of Georgia Tech – Lorraine – the European Campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology – in Metz, France from 2006-2007. He was President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2005. He has held positions at Booz, Allen and Hamilton, AT&T Bell Labs, and Eastman Kodak. From 1992-1996 he was on the Electrical Engineering faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

In 2011 he was awarded the honor Chevalier dans l`Ordre Nationale de Merite, (Knight of the French National Order of Merit), the second highest civilian award given by Republic of France.
He was the first Georgia Tech recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) where he was cited by President Clinton “for leadership in the development of high-capacity, nonbinary optical recording formats.” He also received the National Science Foundation CAREER and the Information Storage Industries Consortium Technical Achievement Award (with Dr. David Warland at UC-Davis) for this work. From 1999-2003 he was the Principal Scientist for Calimetrics where this work was commercialized (Calimetrics was acquired by LSI Logic in 2005). He received the Friend of the Graduate Student Award in 2002 from the GT Graduate Student Association and the 2009 Faculty Achievement Award from the School of ECE.

His research interests are in the general area of communications and information theory. His research group has published in the areas of turbo, LDPC, and constrained codes for magnetic and optical recording; forward error correction and equalization for wireless and optical networks; quantum key distribution, wireless and RFID security; and theory of error control coding. He has published more than 240 papers in journals and conferences and holds 30 US patents. He has served as the research and thesis advisor to more than 50 students at the bachelors, masters, doctoral and post-doctoral levels.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE and served as an Associate Editor for Coding Techniques for the IEEE Transaction on Information Theory. He also served as the Publications Editor for that journal from 1995-1999. He co-edited (with Sergio Verdu) Information Theory: 50 Years of Discovery (Wiley/IEEE Press, 1999). He has also served on the IEEE Publications Activities Board (1998-2001) and is a former Secretary of the IEEE Atlanta Section (2000).

[GT School of ECE]

[McLaughlin CCIT Research Group]

[Family]