Fadel Adib promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure

The Department of EECS is proud to announce the promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure of Fadel Adib, who is a faculty member in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS) with a joint appointment in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Adib’s research focuses on the invention of novel wireless technologies to interconnect, sense, and perceive the physical world in ways that were not possible before. His work brings new wireless capabilities to challenging environments such as the ocean and inside the human body and opens up new wireless sensing primitives in areas spanning climate, ocean conservation, health monitoring, robotic perception and manipulation, logistics, and commerce.

Following the completion of his Master’s and PhD degrees at MIT in 2016, Professor Adib accepted a faculty appointment at the MIT Media Lab, where he founded the Lab’s Signal Kinetics research group. Two years later, he accepted a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In the ensuing years, he and his research team have made significant contributions to ocean research in the form of underwater backscatter networking; batteryless underwater communications nodes; and finding viable solutions to the challenges of underwater-to-air communications. Professor Adib has also made important contributions in novel contactless sensing with applications that include health monitoring, food safety sensing, and robotics. In addition, his work has expanded batteryless connectivity deep into the human body, enabling novel health applications such as batteryless micro-implants. He is currently founder and CEO of Cartesian Systems, a startup aimed at wireless mapping of the physical world; his PhD research on wireless sensing (which won the ACM SIGMOBILE Dissertation Award) led to Emerald Innovations, which specializes in devices for remote health monitoring.

Professor Adib received his undergraduate degree from the American University of Beirut (2011) before earning his master’s (2013) and PhD (2016) at MIT, winning the best master’s and best PhD thesis awards in computer science at MIT. Additionally, he has received multiple prestigious early-career faculty honors, including the CAREER Award (2019) from the US National Science Foundation; the Young Investigator Award (2019) and the Early Career Grant (2020) from the Office of Naval Research; the Sloan Research Fellowship (2021); the Google Faculty Research Award (2017); the Technology Review 35 under 35 award (2014); and most recently, the ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award (2022).