Andrea Goldsmith is an American electrical engineer and the Stephen Harris Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, as well as a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. Her interests are in the design, analysis and fundamental performance limits of wireless systems and networks, and in the application of communication theory and signal processing to neuroscience. She also co-founded and served as chief technology officer of Plume WiFi and Quantenna Communications. Goldsmith has been named as the incoming Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, where she will also join the faculty as the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering. She will begin her appointment on Sep 1st, 2020.
Early life and education
Goldsmith was raised in the San Fernando Valley, California. Her father Werner Goldsmith was a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, and her mother Adrienne Goldsmith was an animator for cartoon shows including The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Goldsmith earned her bachelor's degree in engineering math from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986, and her MS and PhD in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley in 1991 and 1994, respectively. In the years between obtaining her bachelor's and PhD, she spent four years as a systems engineer at a Silicon Valley defense communications startup.
Work and academic career
Goldsmith started her academic career at the California Institute of Technology and was there for four years. She joined Stanford in 1999, becoming an associate professor in 2002 and a full professor in 2007. At Stanford, she has served as chair of the faculty senate, and on the school's task force on women and leadership. In 2006, she took a leave of absence from Stanford and co-founded Quantenna Communications, a company that produces silicon chipsets designed for high-speed, wireless high-definition video home networking. She served as chief technology officer of the startup until returning to Stanford in 2008. She was also a founder and CTO of Plume WiFi, which was founded in 2014 and develops WiFi technology. As an inventor and consultant, she has secured 28 patents. She has authored and co-authored several books, including Wireless Communication, MIMO Wireless Communications and Principles of Cognitive Radio. She has launched and led several multi-university research projects, including DARPA's ITMANET program, and she is a principal investigator in the National Science Foundation Center on the Science of Information. In the IEEE, Goldsmith served on the board of governors for both the Information Theory and Communications societies. She has also been a distinguished lecturer for both societies, served as president of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2009, founded and chaired the Student Committee of the IEEE Information Theory society, and chaired the Emerging Technology Committee of the IEEE Communications Society. She chairs the IEEE Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. She won the 2017 Women in Communications Engineering Mentorship Award from the IEEE Communications Society for her efforts in encouraging women in the fields of technology and engineering. In 2017, she was elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and also to the National Academy of Engineering.
Entropy, Mutual Information, and Capacity for Markov Channels with General Inputs, T. Holliday, A. Goldsmith, P. Glynn, Stanford University Press, 2002
EE359 Wireless Communications, A. Goldsmith, Stanford University Press, 2002
