Dr. Steven L. Grant, a telecommunications researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass., and a native of Belton, Mo., was recently named the first Roy A. Wilkens Missouri Telecommunications Professor at UMR.

The professorship was established by Roy A. Wilkens, a 1966 UMR electrical engineering graduate, to attract experienced electrical engineers to the campus. In 1977, Wilkens founded and served as president of Williams Telecommunications Group, which later became WorldCom. He is also a retired chief executive officer of networks for McLeod USA.

"We are fortunate to have Dr. Grant coming to add prestige to our department and the communications area," says Dr. Kelvin Erickson, chair of UMR’s electrical and computer engineering department.

Grant earned his bachelor of science degree from UMR in 1979, his master of science degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1981, and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1994. All three degrees were in electrical engineering.

Grant began his career working for Bell Labs in Whippany, N.J., in 1980. He then worked on speech coding at ITT-Defense Communications Division for two years before returning to Bell Labs to work on speech coding, echo cancellation and other digital signal processing research and applications. In 1991, Grant joined the Bell Labs acoustic and speech research department in Murray Hill, and a decade later he became the technical manager of the acoustics research group. His most recent work has been at the MIT Lincoln Lab, where he examines nonlinear equalization and sonar research.

"I have been very lucky to do research at Bell Labs and the MIT Lincoln Lab," Grant says. "But I have always wanted to come back home."

Grant has edited two books and co-authored another. He served as co-chair of the 1999 International Workshop on Acoustic Echo and Noise Control and currently serves on its standing committee. In addition, he was an associate editor of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing Letters and now serves as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.