Bio

Christopher Rose is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rutgers University and a founding member of WINLAB. Dr. Rose earned all of his degrees from MIT: S.B. (1979), S.M. (1981), and Ph.D. (1985), and thus considers himself a "semi-lifer at MIT, from 1975 to 1985," "paroled" by his new wife and new baby when he graduated with a Ph.D. in EECS. Following graduate school, he began an almost "30-year-and-counting postdoc" in communication theory.

He joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J. as a member of the Network Systems Research Department, where he regaled his peers--"a wide range of brilliant and uniformly delightful technical angels and curmudgeons"--with levitated center conductor Hi-Tc superconducting cables, annoyed them by showing random lightwave network architectures performed as well as carefully sculpted ones, and puzzled them with odd applications of cellular automata. He has made notable contributions to wireless systems theory and is a full member of the Army Science Board.  In 1990, when Arno (Penzias) told everyone in "Area 11" to go to academe if they were not keenly interested in the corporate bottom line (including his Nobel partner Bob [Wilson]), Dr. Rose was congratulated on his timing as he joined the E&CE at Rutgers University the very next week. He has also served as a full member of the Army Science Board (2013--2014).

His research interests have included novel mobile communications networks, applications of genetic algorithms to control problems in communications networks and interference avoidance methods using universal radios to foster peaceful coexistence in what will be the wireless ecology of the 5GHz U-NII bands.  This work, co-authored with Sennur Ulukus  and Roy Yates, received the 2003 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications (see photo of the ecstatic authors at the Globecom 2004 awards ceremony, picture credit: Aylin Yener).

Dr. Rose's other proudest moments: 1) an NPR interview in which a caller asked him about crop circles and extraterrestrial communication, and 2) his 2004 Nature cover story, a counterpoint to MIT-legend Phil Morrison's famous 1959 paper in the same publication on interstellar communication. For fun, as an outgrowth of research on opportunistic communications,  he also considered the details of a  problem everyone has wondered about at one time or another: how will our first extraterrestrial civilization contact occur? The interesting twist is that it can be FAR more efficient for distant  "little green people" to send information-bearing physical artifacts than electromagnetic signals -- seemingly at odds with current SETI wisdom. This work was featured on the cover of the September 2, 2004 issue of Nature and can be found (along with an astounding amount of press coverage, including a NY Times Editorial!)  under the tongue-in-cheek rubric cosmic communications--here's an associated cartoon competition!

Dr. Rose's current passion is thinking about ways to make the under-represented minority (URM) STEM professoriat dramatically larger by developing academic cohorts whose technical breadth, social consciousness and natural cohesion (all typical URM characteristics) can provide an especially keen vantage point from which to formulate and attack high-profile, high impact problems of great interest to society.

Publications

Eckford, A.W. Krishnaswamy, D. Paluh, J.L. Rose, C. "Guest Editorial Series on Molecular, Biological, and Multiscale Communication." IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication, vol. 32, no. 12, 2014, pp. 2313-2314.

Christopher Rose, Ismat Saira Mian. "Signaling with Identical Tokens: upper bounds with energy constraints." IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2014, pp. 1817-1821.

Christopher Rose, Ismat Saira Mian. "Signaling with identical Tokens: lower bounds with energy constraints." IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2013, pp. 1839-1843. 

See full list of publications, 1988-2020

Media

“New programs seek to diversify faculty at Brown and beyond,” News from Brown, 19 May 2017

Chris Rose: New Associate Dean of Brown University Faculty, News From Brown, September 2015

At MIT

Alumni Profile: The Outer Bounds of Big Questions, Slice of MIT, 19 May 2021/Technology Review, 27 April 2021