Strength in Numbers

Over the summer, Robert Calderbank, a professor of electrical engineering and mathematics and the former director of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University, became dean of natural sciences at Duke.

His research focuses on data communication and storage, and, in 2005, he was named to the National Academy of Engineering for his work in advancing algebraic coding theory and signal processing for wire-line and wireless modems. Previously, he worked as a vice president for research at AT&T Labs, where he was responsible for research projects in networking and multimedia services.

In addition to his new role as dean, Calderbank will be a professor of computer science with joint appointments in mathematics and electrical and computer engineering.

In the spring, Calderbank will be joined in the mathematics department at Duke by his wife, Ingrid Daubechies, currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of mathematics at Princeton. Her research focuses on the mathematical aspects of time-frequency analysis and on wavelets, which have important applications in data compression. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and was recently elected president of the International Mathematical Union.