DR. RICHARD D. GITLIN, is a State of Florida 21st Century World Class Scholar and the Agere Systems Chair Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of South Florida. He has more than 38 years of leadership in the communications and networking industry. Most recently, he was Chief Technology Officer of Hammerhead Systems, a venture funded networking company in Silicon Valley. Previously, he was at Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies for 32-years performing and leading pioneering research and development in digital communications, broadband networking, and wireless systems. Dr. Gitlin was Senior VP for Communications and Networking Research at Bell Labs and later CTO of Lucent's Data Networking Business Unit. After retiring from Lucent, he was visiting professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, where he supervised several doctoral students and research projects.

Dr. Gitlin is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Bell Laboratories Fellow. He is also a co-recipient of the 2005 Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award and the S.O. Rice prize, has co-authored a text, published ~100 papers and holds 43 patents (with 6 pending).

He has conducted and led research and development that has resulted in many innovative products, including: the industry-leading ATLANTA ATM Chipset, the world's first 20 gigabit/sec ATM switch, wire-speed and quality of service-aware IP switches, multicode CDMA (used in 3G HSDPA wireless data), and the BLAST broadband wireless system based on advanced smart antennas (MIMO). Earlier in his career, he led the team that pioneered V.32/V.34 voice-band modems, and in 1986 he was co-inventor of DSL. He was instrumental in launching Globespan, an early DSL chip vendor.

Dr. Gitlin received a Bachelor's degree with honors in Electrical Engineering from The City College of New York, and Masters and Doctor of Engineering Science degrees in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University.

• Data Communications Principles (textbook), Gitlin, Hayes, and Weinstein, Plenum Press (1992).
• "Two-hop Relay Architecture for Next-Generation WWAN/WLAN Integration," H-Y Wei, and Richard D. Gitlin, IEEE Wireless Communications, April 2004
• "Low Latency Handoff for Wireless IP QOS with NeighborCasting," E. Shim, H. Wei, Y. Chang, R.Gitlin, ICC 2002, New York, USA, May 2002
• "Coordinated load balancing, handoff/cell-site selection, and scheduling in multi-cell packet data systems, "Aimin Sang, Xiaodong Wang, Mohammad Madihian, and Richard D. Gitlin, IEEE Wireless Communications, June 2006.
• "Dynamic Channel Management in MIMO OFDM Cellular Systems," Ben Lu, Xiaodong Wang, Richard D. Gitlin and Mohammad Madihian, Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (J. Wiley Interscience), November, 2005.