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.
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Current projects
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All newsFuNCtions lab received a grant from ARO to work on real-time, scalable, and programmable radio architectures based on the RFSoC platforms leveraging AI and agentic workflows.
Prof. Chen is the PI of a $9M grant from ARO focused on RAPTORS–Rapid Analog Processing for Tactical Observation and Opportunistic Radio Spectrum Access. In collaboration with Professors Miroslav Pajic and David Smith (Duke), Arun Natarajan (Yale), Aravind Nagulu (Northeastern), and Raytheon BBN Technologies, this project aims to build intelligent sensing radios and networks with low SWaP-C.
A paper on optimizing arbitrary RF containment using tactical aerial networks and differentiable ray tracing was accepted to IEEE MILCOM’26.
Prof. Chen is the PI of an NSF VINES Track 1 Award focused on building photonics-enabled, energy-efficient massive MIMO radios. This project is in collaboration with Professors Ali Niknejad, Jun-Chau Chien, and Zaijun Chen from UC Berkeley.
A 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.
FuNCtions lab received a 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, and in collaboration with Enegis LLC and NEC Labs America.
Several FuNCtions lab students are out for summer internships: Wei Cheng (Seagate), Mingzhe Han (NEC Labs America), Zhenzhou Qi (Samsung Research America), Sam Rivera (The Aerospace Corporation), and Zehao Wang (Keysight Technologies).
Zhihui Gao (co-advised with Prof. Yiran Chen) successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation and will join MIT RLE as a postdoc. Congratulations, Dr. Gao!
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 Yiming!
Selected talks
Acknowledgments
Our research projects are supported in part by grants from NSF (VINES Track 1, CAREER, CIRC GRAND/ENS, CC* Integration-Large, NewSpectrum, EAGER, SII-NRDZ, CISE Core, SWIFT, and Athena AI Institute for Edge Computing), ARO (W911NF-26-2-A164, W911NF-26-2-A158, W911NF-25-1-0241), 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.
