Recent grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), industrial partners, and New York state government are helping researchers from NYU and NYU-Poly to advance fundamental research in wireless technology and launch the world’s first academic research center to combine wireless and computing with medical applications.
The NSF recently awarded a research team from NYU-Poly an Accelerating Innovation Research grant of $800,000, matched by $1.2 million from corporate backers and the Empire State Development Division of Science, Technology & Innovation, which supports the project through its longstanding partnership with NYU-Poly’s Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications.
Industrial partners include InterDigital, National Instruments (NI), and a startup company founded by NYU-Poly professor Michael Knox. The project aims to advance fundamental knowledge and applications that could increase today’s fourth-generation (4G) cell phone capacity by more than 1,000 times.
Days after that collaboration was finalized, NYU and NYU-Poly announced that NI would also become the founding industrial sponsor of NYU Wireless, a new research center comprised of 25 faculty members and more than 100 graduate and doctoral students, as well as postdoctoral fellows from Courant’s Department of Computer Science, the NYU School of Medicine, and NYU-Poly. They will work with researchers from NI, major federal funding sources such as the NSF, and the National Institutes of Health and subsequent industry partners.
NYU Wireless focuses on advanced communications and antenna technologies, compressed sensing for spectrum efficiency in massively broadband wireless communications and medical imaging, the creation of smaller and smarter cellular networks, and wireless devices that cooperate rather than compete for spectrum.
The center will also build fundamental knowledge of wireless methods and new circuits and systems for a promising new frontier in the wireless spectrum: millimeter-wave and sub-terahertz communications.
New research space totaling 14,500 square feet is scheduled to open on the Downtown Brooklyn campus of NYU-Poly this winter. The new center brings together faculty who have current research projects that total approximately $10 million annually.