Instructors
Dr. Santos is a Research Assistant Professor with the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI), headquartered at Virginia Tech. His main research interests include open radio access networks, radio virtualization, network slicing, and network orchestration. Dr. Santos has been researching these fields since 2017 when he started his Ph.D. in Electronic & Electrical Engineering. His research experience includes developing software-defined radio systems, implementing radio virtualization mechanisms, and bridging SDR with SDN in support of programmable end-to-end communication networks customized to serve different use cases and applications.
Dr. Nishith Tripathi is a research associate professor at Virginia Tech. He has 24 years of industry experience at Nortel Networks, Huawei Technologies, Samsung Research America, and Award Solutions. He led Samsung’s NTN activities in 3GPP and made more than 30 contributions toward the development of the 3GPP NTN specifications. jHe has led several research projects at Virginia Tech related to smart traffic intersections, smart ports, secure NTN, smart warehouses, UAV geofencing, indoor firefighter positioning, secure 5G, and 5G O-RAN testbeds. He has co-authored the world’s first multimedia book on 5G. As a wireless industry expert, Dr. Tripathi has contributed to organizations such as FCC, CTIA, GSMA, Scientific American, FTC, EE Times University, and CNN. He is leading the NTN and UAV/UAS task groups at the NSC. Dr. Tripathi is also leading the coordination among academics to help the Next G Alliance (NGA) of ATIS define the vision and the requirements for 6G.
Dr. Jeffrey H. Reed is the founder of Wireless @ Virginia Tech and served as its Director until 2014. He is the Founding Faculty member of the Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology and served as its interim Director when founded in 2010. He is a co-founder of Federated Wireless, a company developing spectrum-sharing technologies; and PFP Cybersecurity, a company specializing in security for embedded systems. In 2005, Dr. Reed became a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to software radio and communications signal processing and leadership in engineering education.
Luiz DaSilva is the Bradley Professor of Cybersecurity at Virginia Tech. He serves as the inaugural Executive Director of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, a consortium of 42 institutions of higher education in Virginia with a mission of research, innovation, and workforce development in cybersecurity. Prof. DaSilva previously held the chair of Telecommunications at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where he led CONNECT, a research center in future networks involving ten universities in Ireland. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to cognitive networks and wireless resource management. He has also been a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society, and a College of Engineering Faculty Fellow.