Harpreet S. Dhillon named Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. ’56 Faculty Fellow
Harpreet S. Dhillon, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named an Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. ’56 Faculty Fellow by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
Elizabeth and James Turner created the Turner Fellowships in 2011 with a $1 million gift to recognize faculty excellence. James Turner is a 1956 agricultural engineering alumnus who is the retired president and chief operating officer of General Dynamics. He is also a former rector of the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors and in 2004 received Virginia Tech’s highest honor, the William H. Ruffner Medal.
Recipients hold the title of Turner Fellows for a period of five years.
A member of the Virginia Tech faculty since 2014, Dhillon has earned a reputation of being a talented researcher, having consistently produced seminal research results that have been extensively cited and utilized by his peers worldwide. Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters) included him in its annual list of Highly Cited Researchers both in 2017 and 2018.
Dhillon’s research has garnered five best paper awards, including three exceptionally competitive annual awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Communications Society—the 2014 IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize, the 2015 IEEE ComSoc Young Author Best Paper Award, and the 2016 IEEE Heinrich Hertz Award.
Dhillon has written more than 65 journal papers, all of which were published in the top journals of his area, including IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and the IEEE Transactions on Communications. In addition, he has also published more than 57 conference papers in the top venues of his research field and received two conference best paper awards.
He has secured or helped to secure a high level of sponsored funding to support his research totaling $5.9 million, including six awards from the National Science Foundation and one from the National Spectrum Consortium. He is the principal investigator in six of these awards.
Dhillon currently serves on the editorial boards of three IEEE journals: IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, and IEEE Wireless Communications Letters. He has also chaired or co-chaired key symposia and more than a dozen workshops in top conferences of his area, such as the IEEE International Conference on Communications and the IEEE Global Communications Conference.
Dhillon is also a highly regarded mentor and teacher who has successfully integrated several ideas from his research into his classes. Due to his engaging teaching style, he is consistently rated very highly both by his peers and the students.
Dhillon was named the Outstanding New Assistant Professor by the College of Engineering in 2017, a College of Engineering Faculty Fellow in 2018, and the Steven O. Lane Junior Faculty Fellow of Electrical and Computer Engineering by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors in 2018.
In the academic year 2013-14, Dhillon was a Viterbi Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013, where he was a Microelectronics and Computer Development Fellow from 2010 to 2011. He received his bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 2008 and a master’s degree from Virginia Tech in 2010.
