I am the Nortel Networks Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering with a secondary appointment in Computer Science at Duke University. I direct the FuNCtions Lab, working with a group of talented students on projects across the networking, communication, sensing, and energy-efficient computing aspects of wireless, mobile, optical, and quantum networked systems.
My research focuses on both theoretical and experimental aspects of massive antenna systems and millimeter-wave networks, optical and quantum networks, and spectrum sharing systems, and their convergence with edge cloud, energy-efficient computing, and AI/ML. I enjoy building efficient hardware–software systems and experimental testbeds at scale.
Before joining Duke in Fall 2021, I was a postdoc in Electrical Engineering at Yale University (2020–2021), working with Prof. Leandros Tassiulas and Prof. Lin Zhong. I received my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 2020 (advisor: Prof. Gil Zussman) and my B.Eng. in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2014.
I am always looking for motivated B.S., M.S., Ph.D. students and Postdocs to join my group at Duke ECE. If interested, email me your CV, transcript, and a brief note on your research interests.
Research areas
View all
Selected publications
All publicationsNews
All newsA paper on 5G mmWave ISAC through sub-symbol beam switching with CSI extraction and reconstruction was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC). A preliminary version of the work was also presented at IEEE MTT-S RFSA’26.
Received the Thomas Lord Educational Innovation Grant Program award from Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, which will support the expansion of my full-stack IoT systems course to incorporate emerging edge AI and physical AI topics and hands-on labs.
One paper on fiber sensing-based borehole seismic velocity profiling was accepted to ECOC’26. This paper was based on a field trial we conducted at the Newberry Well, OR.
Yiming Li received the ECE Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Awards for the 2025–2026 academic year! Yiming served as the teaching assistant in my ECE 655/CompSci 655 “Full-Stack IoT Systems” course. Congratulations!
Invited to attend the AI-RAN 2026 May Member Meeting in Chandler, AZ, and participated in panel on “Data-for-AI (D-4-AI) Academic Perspectives”.
Sam Rivera received the pretigious National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) fellowship, which supports outstanding graduate students pursuing cutting-edge research in science and engineering. Congratulations!
Talks
Acknowledgments
Our research projects are supported in part by grants from NSF (CAREER, CIRC GRAND/ENS, CC* Integration-Large, NewSpectrum, EAGER, SII-NRDZ, CISE Core, SWIFT, and Athena AI Institute for Edge Computing), ARO (W911NF2510241), SRC/DARPA JUMP 2.0 Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC), Duke Science & Technology Initiative and Pratt School of Engineering, as well as grants and gifts from ACM SIGMOBILE, Enegis, Google, IBM, NEC Labs America, NTT, and NVIDIA. The findings, positions, or opinions of our research projects do not necessarily represent the official policy of any of these organizations.
