Robert Calderbank is the Charles S. Sydnor Professor at Duke University. He grew up in the northwest of England, starting his technical career at Bell Labs after attending graduate school at Caltech. At the dawn of the Internet, he created technology that enabled more than a billion voiceband modems to communicate at rates approaching the Shannon limit. At the dawn of the wireless Internet, when voice gave way to data, he helped develop multiple antenna technology that met rising demand for high data rates. At the start of the quantum revolution, he helped develop the mathematical foundation for quantum error correction. Dr. Calderbank moved from Lucent to AT&T in 1995 where he later became VP, AT&T Labs Research. At AT&T he helped develop the first research lab in the world focused on communications data at very high scale. He moved to Princeton University in 2003 then to Duke in 2010. Since moving to academia, Dr. Calderbank has been involved with pioneering wireless startups, first Flarion Technologies and most recently Cohere Technologies. At Duke University he created the Rhodes Information Initiative (iiD) and launched the +Programs, where project focused team experiences reach hundreds of undergraduates every year. Dr. Calderbank was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2005, to the National Academy of Inventors in 2015, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. He has received several awards, including the 2013 IEEE Hamming Medal for contributions to information transmission, and the 2015 Claude E. Shannon Award.
Marconi Prize recipient
Cited for contributions to the theory and practice of voiceband modems, space-time coding, and quantum error correction.