Christopher Rose

Professor of Engineering, Director of STEMJazz Programs

Christopher Rose attended MIT from 1975 to 1985.  He graduated with a Ph.D. in EECS and almost immediately afterward began what is now a 39-year-and-counting postdoc in communication/information theory starting at Bell Laboratories Research where he rubbed shoulders with a wide range of uniformly delightful technical angels and curmudgeons.  He decamped for Rutgers University after Arno Penzias, then Director of Bell Laboratories Research, 1) banished his Nobel partner astronomer Bob Wilson to Harvard, and 2) proclaimed in a town hall meeting that we'd better hie to academe if post-divestiture we were not concerned with the bottom line.

Chris has roamed over a wide research terrain including better-than-fiber superconducting coaxial cables with levitated center conductors during the heady days of High-Tc superconductors, and a variety of wireless communication problems most notably a Nature cover paper that considered the age-old question, "Are We Alone?"  That paper produced NPR interviews with Ira Flatow and David Kestenbaum, a NY Times article and an editorial, but perhaps most notably Chris' proudest technical moment -- a radio interview where a caller asked him about crop circles and ET communication.  Along the way, Chris won the 2003 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communication, became an IEEE Fellow cited for "contributions to wireless systems theory" in 2007 and received the 2022 IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award.

The common theme in Chris' work is communication/information theory which he sees as a lens on everything, from fundamental physics, the origin of life, molecular communication and computing and perhaps most currently important, the role of reliable and secure information in a free society.