Walid Saad appointed to Rolls Royce Commonwealth Professorship
Walid Saad, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been appointed to the Rolls Royce Commonwealth Professorship.
The Rolls Royce Commonwealth Professorships were established at Virginia Tech through an initiative of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The endowment enables the Virginia Tech College of Engineering to award a total of three professorships in areas that may vary with time according to the technical needs and current trends in engineering education.
Saad’s research addresses challenges at the intersection of digital twins, wireless systems, and artificial intelligence. His seminal research was first to define the fundamental principles for designing, optimizing, and deploying distributed, large-scale digital twin solutions.
Saad has received over $67 million in collaborative research funding, including some of the earliest research projects on digital twins. With over 580 peer-reviewed articles, he is one of the most published faculty at Virginia Tech. His contributions received nearly 60,000 citations, making him the most cited faculty in the College of Engineering and among the top three most-cited researchers across the university.
Saad received several major best paper awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Communications Society, including the prestigious IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in 2023, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication in 2023, and the IEEE Fred W. Ellersick Prize in 2015 and 2022, along with 12 best conference paper awards.
Through integrating research in the classroom along with outstanding mentorship, he has impacted hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students. His advised graduate students went on to become leaders in both industry and academia.
Saad received his Ph.D. in informatics from the University of Oslo, Norway, in 2010. He received a bachelor’s degree in computer and communications engineering from Lebanese University in 2004 and a master’s degree in computer and telecommunications engineering from American University of Beirut in 2007.