Pramod Varshney

Professor Pramod K. Varshney is a distinguished professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University. He is also an IEEE Life Fellow, awarded in 1997 for contributions in distributed detection and data fusion. Professor Varshney served as a reference for Professor Du and nominator for Professor Phoha, and he will introduce our three new 2023 IEEE Fellows.

In addition, Professor Varshney's own research has been recognized recently. In 2021, he received two prestigious awards from two different IEEE Societies. The IEEE Syracuse Section would like to acknowledge and celebrate the accomplishments of Professor Varshney that culminated in these two honors.

The IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS) honored Professor Varshney with the Pioneer Award. Given annually since 1949, the Pioneer Award is one of the most notable awards in the electronics and aerospace systems field, recognizing contributions significant to bringing into being systems that are still in existence today. The award, presented in March 2022, recognizes Professor Varshney’s contributions to signal processing and information fusion enabling advanced aerospace and electronic systems.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society selected Professor Varshney to receive the 2021 Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award that was presented in May 2022. This award honors those who have made outstanding technical contributions to theory and/or practice in technical areas within the scope of the society, as demonstrated by publications, patents, or recognized impact on the field. There are over 400,000 IEEE members in over 160 countries and this award is annually given to one or two individuals.

Wenliang (Kevin) Du

Wenliang (Kevin) Du is a professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University. The IEEE Computer Society awarded him IEEE Fellow status for contributions in cybersecurity education and research.

In 2002, Professor Du started developing hands-on labs for students’ computer security education. His labs are now used by more than 400 universities and colleges all over the world. His research focuses on system security for web, mobile, smartphone/tablet and Android operating systems. He has also developed improved access control for mobile systems.

Professor Du also received the IEEE Region 1 Technological Innovation (Academic) Award in 2023 and was recently named principal investigator for a National Science Foundation grant of $399,000 titled: “Building and Internet Emulator for Cybersecurity Education.”

Vir Phoha

Vir Phoha is a professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University. The IEEE Computer Society awarded him IEEE Fellow status in recognition of his development of attack-averse active authentication using behavioral patterns.

Phoha’s research  in systems security involves studying malignant systems, active authentication, machine learning, decision trees and statistical and evolutionary methods. He analyzes large-time series data streams and static data sets and anomalies and optimization of computer networks to build defensive and offensive cyber-based systems.

Professor Phoha was named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2020 and a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science in 2018. He has achieved 13 patents for inventions in machine learning, biometrics, user identification and authentication, data decision-making and cybersecurity attacks. He is currently an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems and two other journals.

Britton Plourde

Britton Plourde is a Physics Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University. The IEEE Council on Super Conductivity awarded him IEEE Fellow status in recognition of his contributions to integration of qubits into future practical quantum computing systems.

Professor Plourde is a leading expert in quantum computing and is developing new computers capable of generating solutions to complex problems using qubit computing systems. His work examines ways to improve superconducting quantum circuits. He and his research partners recently received a $5.6 million Army Research Office grant to investigate processes that deposit energy in solid-state qubits, which can lead to correlated errors in quantum computers.

Professor Plourde has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on more than 15 federally funded grants. At Syracuse University, he has been awarded more than $10 million in research funding from a number of government sources and national research foundations.