Sirin Tekinay, PhD, an associate professor in the electrical and computer engineering department, was named program director for the Theoretical Foundations Cluster in the NSF’s Division of Computing and Communication Foundations. 

Tekinay will seek scientific researchers with fresh ideas, to unify theorists and practitioners and to encourage and fund joint, interdisciplinary research projects. “The NSF is the main supporter of fundamental research in computing and communications,” said Tekinay, “and I aim to formulate calls for proposals with new ideas.”

Tekinay’s research interests include wireless systems such as cellular systems, local area networks, radio networks, intelligent displays as well as sensors and computer communications.  She also researches mobility-enhanced services to deliver information in the wireless environment that is user-specific, time-specific, and location-specific in various media such as text, audio and video. By making use of mobility and location information of users, her research improves network functions such as routing and broadcasting. She has adopted mathematical approaches from microeconomics, especially game theory, traditionally been used to predict the stock market, and is applying these models to estimating mobility, information needs, bandwidth and the power needs of wireless users.

 Her paper, “Power Efficiency of User Cooperation in Multi-hop Wireless Networks,” will be published this coming winter in IEEE Communications Letters. She holds seven patents involving wireless geo-location systems. Her most recent patent, awarded in July 2002, was for detecting the geographical location of wireless units. 

Tekinay is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). She is on the editorial boards of the IEEE Communications Magazine and the IEEE Communications Surveys.