The IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc) is pleased to announce that Professor Muriel Médard of MIT is named the 2021 Padovani Lecturer. The Padovani Lecturer Program was established with a generous gift by Dr. Roberto Padovani in 2009. The award provides for an outstanding member of the information theory community to deliver a lecture at one of the ITSoc’s Schools of Information Theory, for the benefit of students and postdoctoral researchers. 

Muriel Médard is the Cecil H. and Ida Green Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at MIT, where she leads the Network Coding and Reliable Communications Group in the Research Laboratory for Electronics at MIT.   She is a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors, and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. She has made numerous and profound contributions to the theory and practice of network coding, optical networks and wireless communications.  More recently, she is interested in designing  decoders using GRAND (Guessing Additive Noise Decoding), that are universal and use any knowledge about noise statistics to their advantage, in bringing network coding into network protocols and using them to build new security tools, particularly for post-quantum cryptography. She has received numerous  awards for her work and service. Professor Médard will give her lecture at the the India Information Theory School in June 28-July 1st that will be offered online.

The IEEE Information Theory Society gratefully acknowledges the financial support from Qualcomm to the Padovani Lecturer Program.