Robert Calderbank

Robert Calderbank directs the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke University, where he is Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics. Before moving to academia in 2004, Dr. Calderbank was Vice President for Research at AT&T, creating the first of a new type of research lab, where masses of data generated by network services became a giant sandbox, in which fundamental discoveries in information science became a source of commercial advantage. At the start of his career at Bell Labs, Dr. Calderbank developed voiceband modem technology that was widely licensed and incorporated in over a billion devices. Later, he developed technology that improves the speed and reliability of wireless communication by correlating signals across several transmit antennas. Invented in 1996, this space-time coding technology has been incorporated in a broad range of 3G, 4G and 5G wireless standards. He served on the Technical Advisory Board of Flarion Technologies, a wireless infrastructure company acquired by Qualcomm 2008.