Texas ECE is proud to announce the arrival of professor Kaushik Chowdhury and assistant professor Lillian Chin to the faculty of the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Kaushik Chowdhury is a professor and holds the Chandra Family Endowed Distinguished Professorship in Electrical and Computer Engineering #2 in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.
He obtained his BEng from the VJTI Mumbai, MS from the University of Cincinnati, and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining UT Austin, he spent fifteen years as a professor at Northeastern University, Boston.  His research interests center on applied machine learning for wireless, multimodal sensor fusion, and networked robotics.

Prof. Chowdhury has worked on several large-scale wireless community infrastructure projects that include the Colosseum RF/network emulator as well as the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research project office, a joint $100 million public-private partnership between the NSF and  wireless industry consortium to create city-scale testing platforms. He enjoys bridging the wireless systems and ML communities within the NSF AI Institute For Future Edge Networks And Distributed Intelligence, led by The Ohio State University.

He was a finalist for the 2023 US Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. He was also the winner of the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2017, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award in 2017, the Office of Naval Research Director of Research Early Career Award in 2016, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2015. He is the recipient of best paper awards at IEEE GLOBECOM'19, DySPAN'19, INFOCOM'17, ICC'13,'12,'09, and ICNC'13.

He has also served in several leadership roles, including Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Simulation, and as Technical Program Chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2021, IEEE CCNC 2021 , IEEE DySPAN 2021, ACM MobiHoc 2022, and IEEE MILCOM 2023. He serves on the steering committee for IEEE INFOCOM and IEEE CCNC conferences as well as DroNet Workshop.

Lillian Chin is an assistant professor and a Texas Instrument /Jack Kilby Fellow in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

She is interested in designing robotic bodies and their materials for optimized interaction with their environment through embedded perception and computational design. Lillian received her bachelors, masters and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. From 2023-2024, she worked as a Schmidt Science Fellow at the National Institutes of Health under Leo Cohen and Tom Bulea.

She is the recipient of several fellowships including the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Her work has been published in Science and Science Advances and has been recognized with awards such as the 2019 IEEE Robosoft Best Poster Award, the 2019 ACM CS and Law Best Paper Award and the 2022 Leventhal City Prize. Lillian has also focused heavily in research mentorship, mentoring 21 undergraduates and 2 masters students over her PhD to write 8 papers. Nearly two thirds of these students were women and other gender minorities, nearly half were underrepresented racial minorities, and a third were co-authors on papers.