Innovators Award 2010

Having obtained B.S. and M.S. degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China; M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Pittsburgh, PA, Dr. Yun-Qing Shi has joined New Jersey Institute of Technology as a professor since 1987. His research interests include data hiding, steganalysis, and forensics, resulting in 12 awarded US patents. He is an author/coauthor of 250 papers, a book, and five book chapters; the editor-in-chief of LNCS Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security, and an associate editor of three journals. He served as an associate editor of two IEEE transactions and a few journals, an IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer, a technical chair of a few international conferences/workshops; and delivered 100 invited talks around the world. He is the chair of Signal Processing Chapter at IEEE North Jersey Section, a member of a few IEEE technical committees, and a Fellow of IEEE for his contribution to Multidimensional Signal Processing.

It is with great pride that I accept the "Innovators Award" from the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame for my work on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for wireless communications. It is satisfying to see that my early contributions to the theory and practice of wireless communications, and my subsequent work in devising concrete solutions for realizing high-speed wireless links, are being recognized by this prestigious organization.
- Dr. Leonard Cimini, Jr. on receiving the award

Dr. Len Cimini received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, and, then worked at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs for twenty years. In 2002, he joined the ECE Department at the University of Delaware. He has published more than 140 journal and conference papers and has been awarded 21 US patents. Dr. Cimini has been very active within the IEEE, and he was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE J-SAC: Wireless Communications Series. He has served two terms as a Member at-Large on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Communications Society, and is currently Vice President - Publications. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2000 for contributions to the theory and practice of high-speed wireless communications, and, in 2007, was given the James R. Evans Avant Garde Award from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society for his pioneering work on OFDM for wireless communications.

Linda Brzustowicz, M.D. is a Professor of Genetics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She received her BA in Biochemistry from Harvard University, followed by medical school and psychiatric residency training at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She has been a faculty member at Rutgers since 1994. A board-certified psychiatrist with training in molecular and statistical genetics, she investigates the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders, focusing on schizophrenia and autism. Work in her laboratory includes multiple facets of the genetic studies of these disorders, including development of phenotype definitions, subject recruitment and assessment, genotyping and statistical analysis for linkage and association studies, comparative genomic analysis, and gene expression studies. Dr. Brzustowicz's laboratory has identified the role of the genes NOS1AP in schizophrenia susceptibility and EN2 in autism susceptibility.